Phoronix

While Apache OpenOffice development is rather stagnant, many of the original OpenOffice.org developers left for LibreOffice long ago, and LibreOffice has been delivering far more modern features and functionality, people continue to download OpenOffice. This week the Apache Software Foundation is celebrating more than 333 million downloads of their open-source office suite...

Earlier this month Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS was delayed by one week due to an OEM install bug leading to broken Snaps support. Now with Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS the Canonical developers are racing down to a last-minute rebuild of images over a NVIDIA proprietary driver issue...

A new release of Archinstall, an easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer, is on the way...

Google engineers today promoted Chrome 105 to their stable channel across Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android platforms...

The latest Linux hardware enablement work to report on for Intel's Meteor Lake client platform is Thunderbolt support being queued ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window...

Richard Hughes as the lead developer of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd at Red Hat announced the release this morning of Fwupd 1.8.4 as a nice update to this open-source firmware updating utility. Fwupd 1.8.4 not only adds support for some new hardware and fixes but notably begins adding the infrastructure to allow facilitating BIOS changes to the system from within Linux...

With Intel's Meteor Lake moving to a tiled/chiplet approach, we have already seen some interesting changes on the Linux driver side and confirmation of the introduction of a "Versatile Processing Unit" coming with Meteor Lake (MTL) for inference acceleration. Another interesting confirmation from new Linux driver patches is their media encode/decode moving to a "standalone media" Graphics Technology (GT) block...

Mainlined to the Linux kernel less than one year ago was the "asus_wmi_ec_sensors" for supporting temperature / fan speed / CPU current sensor reading on a variety of newer ASUS motherboards. That driver is now being removed as a superior driver is taking over the ASUS motherboard sensor reading duties...

In addition to continued improvements to its Steam Snap for running that gaming client within Canonical's sandboxed confines, the latest Linux gaming component to receive similar treatment is now Feral Interactive's GameMode...

Back in May Intel announced SYCLomatic as an open-source tool for converting CUDA code to C++ SYCL for execution within their oneAPI stack on Intel GPUs and more. Out today is SYCLomatic 20220829 as their first tagged version of this code porting helper...

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who continues to be focused on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code tacked on the latest feature for Mesa 22.3...

AMD CEO Lisa Su today formally introduced their Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors built atop their Zen 4 architecture.

The UEFI Forum has published the UEFI 2.10 and ACPI 6.5 specifications to make these standards more adaptable to IoT platforms and other new device support from the LoongArch processor architecture to CXL memory support...

Following last week's initial batch of Intel i915 GT updates for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.1, today a new pull request was issued of drm-intel-next material that is primed for Linux 6.1...

An interesting commit made it into the open-source PostgreSQL database server this morning...

Along with all the other ongoing Linux work for Arc Graphics, another feature patch series from Intel worth mentioning is they have been buttoning up work on DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport Display Stream Compression (MST DSC) functionality...

Last week I outlined getting Intel Arc Graphics running on a open-source Linux graphics driver when using Linux 6.0 and later (along with a currently-experimental module option override) and then Mesa 22.2+. Now that I've had more days with the Intel Arc Graphics A380 as the company's budget discrete GPU, here are more of my thoughts on this graphics card that has begun retailing in the US for $139.

Back in early June AMD engineers began posting support for enabling Virtual NMI on Linux for AMD CPUs with KVM and permitting hardware support. VNMI is expected to finally happen on the AMD side with Zen 4 processors and today they posted their latest revision of this work...

Last week I wrote about Mesa's R300 Gallium3D driver seeing new optimizations for R300~R500 class GPUs from the ATI days, thanks to the open-source community. Another merge request is now open that finishes up the latest optimization spree for these old pre-AMD GPUs on Linux...

The ASpeed "AST" DRM driver that is for use with ASpeed BMCs on server platforms for display capabilities is preparing to see DMA-BUF and PRIME sharing support. This is useful so the ASpeed BMC can see the screen contents even if the server is relying on a discrete GPU rather than the baseboard management controller's monitor output...

Linus Torvalds just released the third weekly release candidate of the upcoming Linux 6.0 kernel...

Wine 7.16 fell slightly off its Friday bi-weekly release train and arrived this morning...

Coming with GNOME 43 is a "Device Security" panel within the GNOME Control Center. While intended to help ensure their system is protected, Ubuntu isn't onboard with this Device Security functionality yet and has stripped it out from their GNOME build for Ubuntu 22.10...

Prior to this past week's Ubuntu 22.10 feature freeze, webp-pixbuf-loader was promoted to the main archive for allowing WebP images to have thumbnail support within the GNOME desktop on this next Ubuntu release and being able to open up WebP image files within the GNOME image viewer and the like...

Longtime AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olšák is at it again with some interesting optimizations for RadeonSI Gallium3D and is eyeing at enabling OpenGL threading by default...

A number of noteworthy changes have begun queuing for the Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window opening up in just over one month...

GIMP 2.99.12 is out as a weekend surprise as the newest development release towards the GIMP 3.0 image manipulation program's release...

Debian has begun a general resolution process to solicit a vote by its stakeholders what to do with non-free firmware...

Earlier this month AMD posted Linux kernel patches preparing LbrExtV2 as updated Last Branch Record functionality being introduced with upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors. That LbrExtV2 support for the Linux kernel's "perf" subsystem has now been queued up in its respective branch ahead of the Linux 6.1 feature merge window beginning in early October...

As part of a broader effort to reduce system memory use on Ubuntu Linux particularly for server and container/cloud use-cases, Ubuntu 22.10's OpenSSH server has switched to using socket-based activation...

One of the questions that has come up following my AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Linux testing has been how well air-cooling is working out for the 280 Watt workstation CPU. Water cooling is, of course, most ideal but there are air coolers that can work out sufficiently too. Here are some quick reference results...

With the OpenMP 5.0 parallel programming specification there is the reverse offload capability for going from the offloaded device back to the system host. The GCC 13 open-source compiler is seeing work recently around supporting this functionality...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out early with his usual weekly development summary that highlights all of this prominent open-source desktop environment. Notable this week is KDE integrating support for re-binding extra mouse buttons as well as a lot of continued work on Discover...

NetworkManager 1.40 has been released as this widely-used software for configuring wired and wireless network interfaces under Linux...

Canonical has released a new version of Mir, their display server that now focuses on making it easy adapting new environments to use Wayland by being an adaptable Wayland compositor...

While we are about three years out from seeing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, it was announced today that the GTK2 toolkit will not be supported in that next major RHEL version...

In the year since Intel announced 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors there have been a number of patches tuning the Linux kernel's scheduler and other code to better deal with the mix of the performance and efficient cores. While that looked to be all buttoned up for a number of months now with Alder Lake CPUs performing well on Linux, another patch series further adjusting the Linux sched/fair code was published to help with these Intel hybrid processor designs...

While Intel GPUs support VESA Adaptive-Sync, for Arc Graphics Intel announced Smooth Sync as what amounts to a dithering filter to make screen tearing less of an issue when not running with vsync enabled or lacking an Adaptive-Sync display...

Meta/Facebook engineers have announced their work on THP Shrinker as a way for Linux's Transparent Hugepages (THP) to be more efficient and avoiding memory waste by removing under-utilized transparent hugepages...

Thanks to the work of independent developer Luke Jones and as part of his Asusctl Linux project, ASUS laptops continue seeing better feature support on Linux and with the v6.1 cycle kicking off in October are more ASUS ROG laptop enhancements that have been readied...

While LibreOffice has supported some input gestures in the past like swiping and long presses with the GTK front-end as well as some Android and iOS specific additions, it looks like greater gesture support is on the way for this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Intel GPUs from the consumer desktop Arc Graphics hardware to the Intel Data Center Flex GPU Series "Arctic Sound M" and forthcoming Xe HPC Ponte Vecchio are built around fully open-source drivers. A common misconception or confusion I've heard many times over the past number of months has been questioning whether Intel's discrete GPU driver support on Linux is open-source or is closed-source, etc. Well, it's fully open-source aside from the usual firmware caveat and running on Linux. Here is some initial commentary with running the Intel Arc Graphics A380 on Linux!

Lutris as the open-source game manager that integrates with the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other game collections and emulators is out with a new update...

Brought up back in 2020 was the readfile system call for efficiently reading small files with the intention of it being simple for reading small files such as those via sysfs, procfs, and similar file-systems. The readfile patches were re-based yesterday against the current Linux 6.0 state, leaving hope that the new system call might finally be sent in for the next kernel cycle...

The FreeBSD release engineering team has published their initial release plans for FreeBSD 14.0 as well as follow-on FreeBSD 13.2 and 12.4 releases for the current stable series of this BSD operating system...

While mostly of benefit to server administrators with large fleets of hardware, Linux 6.1 aims to make it easier to help spot problematic CPUs/cores by reporting the likely socket and core when a segmentation fault occurs, which can help in spotting any trends if routinely finding the same CPU/core is causing problems...

Async page flipping via DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC has been available with the Direct Rendering Manager's legacy API but hasn't been supported by the atomic mode-setting interface. However, a proposed patch series would add that atomic async flip support and wire it up initially for the AMDGPU DRM driver. Meanwhile Valve's Gamescope compositor in user-space would be ready to make use of it...

In addition to AMD-Xilinx working on new network driver code, a new DRM display driver, and other kernel features recently covered on Phoronix, they are also preparing upstream Linux kernel support for the "CDX" bus with their FPGA devices...

In addition to MGLRU being planned for Linux 6.1 as a big improvement to the page reclamation code and nice performance benefits, another memory management related change that has been floating on Andrew Morton's "mm-unstable" branch recently has been supporting explicit memory tiers and work around improving the Linux kernel's tiered memory support...

After being marked as obsolete in GCC 12, GNU Compiler Collection developers are now preparing to remove compiler support for the CompactRISC CR16 architecture in GCC 13...