Phoronix

Barring any unforeseen issues from coming about, Mesa 22.3 will hopefully be released next week...

For those wondering about the out-of-the-box performance of different modern Linux distributions when running the new Intel Raptor Lake processors, here are six different distributions running on the current flagship Core i9 13900K processor. Tested this round was CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux, Debian Bookworm (Testing), EndeavourOS, Fedora Workstation 37, and Ubuntu 22.10.

SDL 2.26 RC1 was released today as the pre-release for the upcoming SDL 2.26 library...

In addition to the very successful FEX-Emu emulator for enjoying Linux x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 and other x86/x86_64 software on Arm there is also the Box86 and Box64 projects with similar goals. Out today is Box64 v0.2 and Box86 v0.2.8 for running Linux binaries on other architectures...

The Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan 1.3.235 as the latest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API...

Being merged this week to GNU Binutils is initial support for reading and writing to new "SFrame" sections of binaries...

OpenSUSE has officially released openSUSE Leap Micro 5.3 as the newest version of their OS built atop SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 and SLE Micro 5.3 for providing a lightweight, modern OS that is auto-updating, immutable, and provides other distinct features over Tumbleweed or Leap...

Currently when hot-plugging a new GPU to a running X.Org Server, the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver ends up being utilized. However, a new "HotplugDriver" xorg.conf option has been introduced by AMD to allow users to specify their desired DDX driver. In turn this makes it possible for those hot-plugging hardware like AMD Radeon GPUs such as within eGPU enclosures to specify using the xf86-video-amdgpu driver instead...

Mesa's AGX "Asahi" Gallium3D driver for providing OpenGL / GLES support on Apple M1/M2 SoCs has begun making some early preparatory changes for eventually supporting the in-development DRM/KMS kernel driver. The kernel driver is still a work-in-progress and not close to being merged yet and the user-space API not yet set in stone, but some early changes in better preparing the Mesa driver for actually running on the Apple Silicon hardware under Linux have been merged...

This week's batch of platform-drivers-x86 "fixes" for the ongoing Linux 6.1 kernel is a bit more notable than usual. In particular, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Laptop 5 devices are now supported along with some other hardware support enablement...

Adding to the material queuing in DRM-Next is another drm-misc-next pull which is likely the last batch of DRM core and small driver feature updates expected for Linux 6.2...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 was officially released today as the latest update to this leading enterprise Linux distribution. This afternoon also marked the release already of RHEL-derived AlmaLinux 9.1...

QEMU 7.2 is gearing up for release in December as the next feature release to this widely-used processor emulator by the Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.2-rc1 is available for testing with a number of new features and improvements coming in this release...

While Microsoft is celebrating the GA release today of SQL Server 2022, open-source developers have SQLite 3.40 premiering today as the newest version of this embed-friendly SQL database implementation widely used by many cross-platform applications and other software for lightweight SQL database engine needs...

In addition to Godot 4.0 adding a movie maker mode, some additional news for this popular open-source game engine this week is the debut of Godot 4.0 Beta 5...

Anbox Cloud as Canonical's solution for Android containers in the cloud is out with a shiny new feature release...

For going along with the recently merged initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" support in GCC 13 (in case you missed it, there is further tuning work still ongoing), the Zen 4 support has now been merged to GNU Binutils...

Proposed last month was a Fedora 40 change proposal for "porting Fedora to modern C" that amounts to tightening its C language legacy support. This change focused on ensuring packaged C code is compliant with strict C99 compilers has now been signed off on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...

At this year's KDE annual developer conference, Akademy, they announced new community goals around software accessibility, environmentally sustainable software, and automating internal processes. A talk is being held later this month to further their agenda around these goals...

With a new patch queued up in the hardware monitoring subsystem's hwmon-next branch, several more ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors will enjoy working sensor monitoring support...

Back in March AMD began sending out patches for PerfMonV2 support with Zen 4 CPUs. This updated AMD Performance Monitoring "V2" code has premiered now with AMD Ryzen 7000 series and AMD EPYC 9004 series processors and the host-side PerfMonV2 code was merged in Linux 5.19. But support for PerfMonV2 within KVM guests has been lacking while now an updated patch series is working to address the functionality there...

Adding to the growing list of changes expected to be sent in during the Linux 6.2 merge window next month is HID-BPF. This is the Red Hat led effort around using eBPF within the HID subsystem for input devices...

Last week for the AMD EPYC 4th Gen "Genoa" launch day I published initial AMD EPYC 9554 and EPYC 9654 Linux benchmarks as part of my review. Those 64-core and 96-core Zen 4 processors performed phenomenally with Genoa having AVX-512, twelve channels of DDR5-4800 system memory support, higher TDP allowance, and other improvements over prior Milan(X) server processors. The other SKU that AMD sent over for review is the EPYC 9374F as their new 32-core high frequency part. For less than $5k, the EPYC 9374F is a high frequency Zen 4 32-core part with a 320 Watt TDP. Today's benchmarks are looking at the EPYC 9374F against the EPYC 9554/9654 and various other AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon Scalable processors under Linux.

Canonical announced today they have collaborated with Intel to provide new enterprise-grade Ubuntu images designed for next-gen Intel IoT platforms...

Firefox 107 has been released as stable today by Mozilla...

After some release setbacks -- most recently by that OpenSSL security vulnerability -- Fedora 37 is now officially released...

IBM is working to extend Power10's MMA architecture with a new feature for "dense math" that is expected to premiere with future IBM Power processors...

Following Znver4 being added to GCC 13 at the end of October albeit a basic implementation, out this week is a follow-up patch to begin making more adaptations to the AMD Zen 4 target...

In addition to the previously-reported Ampere SMpro hardware monitoring "HWMON" driver coming for Linux 6.2, there are also at least two other drivers for Ampere's co-processor set to be introduced with this next kernel version...

As of Monday the GCC 13 compiler has concluded its stage one feature development and has progressed onto stage three that now just focuses on bug fixing...

To the USB4/Thunderbolt driver in the Linux kernel Intel is adding support for system wake on connect/disconnect...

Since last year when building the Linux kernel using LLVM's Clang compiler it's been possible to enable link-time optimizations (LTO) for the kernel build. Building the Linux kernel with GCC has lacked LTO support while a patch series posted today is the latest attempt to make that happen...

Leading AArch64 server processor vendor Ampere Computing announced this summer AmpereOne as the branding for their next-generation AArch64 "cloud native" server processor design succeeding their current Ampere Altra / Ampere Altra Max processors based on Neoverse-N1. While the AmpereOne processors have yet to be formally launched, with the new AArch64 core being an original design, Ampere Computing has already been submitting support patches to the open-source compilers. The latest twist in this enablement is now acknowledging a new "Ampere-1A" variant...

In addition to the Vulkan renderer and plethora of other enhancements coming with Godot 4.0, a late v4.0 addition for this very successful open-source game engine is introducing a movie maker mode...

Earlier this month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX with availability set for 13 December. Meanwhile today the embargo lifts on more details surrounding the RDNA3 architecture and these new graphics cards.

The latest milestone for Rusticl as Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL Gallium3D implementation is that -- when running on Intel Gen12 Xe graphics -- has reached official OpenCL 3.0 conformance as recognized by The Khronos Group...

Going back to late 2020 Intel's open-source/Linux engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking "LAM" enablement for that feature coming with future processors. With the upcoming Linux 6.2, the kernel-side enablement for Intel LAM appears to be finally wrapped up...

For those compiling their programs using the common "-O2" optimization level as is used for the production builds by many Linux distributions and other software vendors, small loop unrolling is being enabled at this level for GCC 13. Enabling small loop unrolling with -O2 should help the performance in some areas of modern Intel and AMD CPUs...

Going back eight years to Linux 3.15 there has been Sony DualShock 4 controller support using the "hid-sony" driver thanks to work from the open-source community. But now Sony is adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer "hid-playstation" driver that they started for PlayStation 5 controller support and are now extending it backwards for the PS4 controller...

The Linux kernel built with Clang has supported Shadow Call Stack "SCS: to prevent return address overwrites. With patches building up for Linux 6.2, Dynamic Shadow Call Stack is being implemented to avoid the overhead of SCS on processors supporting pointer authentication (PAC)...

Linux 6.1 is inching closer to its early-to-mid December stable release with Linux 6.1-rc5 having just been released...

In addition to AMD this week having released the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler "AOCC" 4.0 as their LLVM/Clang downstream now with various optimizations for Zen 4, the company also released AOMP 16.0-2 as the newest version of their other LLVM/Clang downstream... AOMP is their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler focused on providing the latest Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading support...

This week the release candidate of openSUSE Leap Micro 5.3 was announced for testing. The Leap Micro project is openSUSE's modern and lightweight host Linux operating system intended for edge / embedded / IoT use-cases...

Last month I wrote about a Linux sensor driver being written for the AMD-powered OneXPlayer Mini gaming handheld device. The good news is that this driver has matured enough that it's now queued for introduction in the Linux 6.2 kernel...

Mold is the modern, high performance, and open-source linker taking on the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.7 has been released as the newest update to this very promising linker, but unfortunately the lead developer is evaluating a license change. Due to still losing money over working on it full-time, he may be forced to change the software license without obtaining sustainable funding...

As of this summer the upstream, open-source Broadcom V3D direct rendering manager kernel driver has enabled support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (and newer). With the latest mainline Linux kernel builds this means the ability to enjoy accelerated graphics on the Raspberry Pi hardware paired with the latest Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code without worrying about out-of-tree patches...

Google announced funding for silicon manufacturing for participating open-source projects using the process design kit with GlobalFoundries...

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging the FFmpeg library is out with its newest feature release...

The wlroots Wayland compositor support library that started out as a companion project to Sway is out with a shiny new feature release...

Following last week's batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD changes slated for Linux 6.2, on Friday another round of feature patches were sent in for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle. There is continued work around new IP blocks presumably for RDNA3 and MI300 graphics while given the more modularized development approach with block-by-block enablement makes it harder to ascertain the current status...