Phoronix

Armbian as the Ubuntu and Debian based Linux distribution that is optimized for single board computers primarily in the ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V space is out with its first major update of 2023...

The Vulkan 1.3.242 spec is now available with a handful of clarifications and fixes to the existing text as well as introducing the new VK_NV_low_latency extension...

The Linux kernel since last year has mistakenly left systems relying on the original Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for Spectre V2 mitigation without Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP) coverage for cross-HyperThread dealing with this Spectre vulnerability. There is a patch underway that is resolving this issue for Intel Skylake era systems...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is seeing work towards being able to support Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.2 with VKD3D-Proton to further enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on Linux...

A change made to the Linux kernel back in 2016 is causing issues with NVMe PCIe support on some ARM64 devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. A new kernel quirk is on the way for aiming to address that and yield working NVMe storage...

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture...

While two years ago in Linux 5.16 multi-actuator hard drive support was merged, with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel the BFQ I/O scheduler is now seeing some tuning for multi-actuator drives...

The hardware monitoring support among consumer desktop motherboards continues to improve with Linux 6.3 adding sensor support for many ASUS B650/B660/X670 AMD Ryzen motherboards...

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust...

Cloud Hypervisor as a reminder is what started out as an open-source Intel project to develop a modern hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and with security being among the leading concerns. Cloud Hypervisor more recently is developed as a Linux Foundation project but with Intel's software engineers being among the leading contributors to the project along with the likes of Arm, Tencent, Bytedance, and Microsoft...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.3 merge window landed earlier this week with a few notable additions this cycle...

FreeBSD 13.2 Beta 3 is now available in providing the latest test release for this forthcoming update to the FreeBSD 13 stable series...

The RISC-V architecture updates were merged this Saturday for the Linux 6.3 merge window...

Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support...

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds...

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors...

While last week brought the Plasma 5.27 release as the last feature update to the Plasma 5 series, KDE developers haven't letup in their development efforts with this week continuing to be quite busy for the developers from bug fixing to new features...

Along with all of the Arm SoC and board updates that were merged to the mainline Linux 6.3 kernel earlier in the week, the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have also landed for this next Linux kernel version...

The MFD subsystem changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.3 kernel that include a new driver for the Intel Platform Management Component Interface (PMCI) for use by the BMC controllers on the Intel Max 10 series FPGAs...

As written about last year, the Laminar Research developers responsible for the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software have been working to make use of Mesa's Zink for leveraging OpenGL atop Vulkan to thereby avoid vendor OpenGL drivers that can vary in quality across platforms. With X-Plane 12.04b3, that goal is finally realized...

Introduced to the mainline kernel two years ago with Linux 5.12 was the IDMAPPED mounts functionality that is useful from systemd-homed to containers and other use-cases. Since then more Linux file-systems and software has added support for IDMAPPED mounts and it's being furthered along now with Linux 6.3...

The merge request for landing the first of "many" parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland...

It's not too often I get to talk about major FreeBSD graphics driver improvements, but with the latest X.Org Server Git code paired with the recent NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver there is now support for PRIME render offload should you be using a multi-GPU setup on this BSD...

Adding to all of the other AMD changes coming with Linux 6.3 is now also having the AMD-Xilinx XDMA driver in tow. Getting this XDMA subsystem driver upstreamed is important for unblocking more Xilinx-based feature code to be merged into the Linux kernel...

Back in 2020 Google and the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) came up with a "Criticality Score" to rank the importance/criticality of open-source projects. The Criticality Score is a means of quantifying the importance of an open-source project such as if in need of funding or development assistance. Criticality Score 2.0 has now been published...

The 8BitDo Pro 2 Wired Controller as a popular ~$35 USD gaming controller will see proper support with the Linux 6.3 kernel...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner has been public now for about two years. CBL-Mariner has been in use for Microsoft's use-cases from their Azure cloud to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) while their newest release continues a recent trend of pointing towards a high performance computing (HPC) workloads focus too...

Merged on Thursday to Mesa 23.1 was implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles using hashed stages with support for caching and replay. What makes this work notable is that it in turn allows the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 running with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton on Linux to begin enjoying ray-tracing support...

The Linux 6.3 scheduler changes were merged earlier this week that overall provide a collection of minor improvements to this important area of the kernel...

For many years now there has been delta RPM support built into Fedora to allow just downloading the binary difference between the currently installed RPM package and the updated version. While this made sense during the days of limited Internet connectivity/bandwidth, delta RPMs haven't proven useful in years and now Fedora Linux is considering removing this support...

Yet another Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver optimization has landed in Mesa 23.1 ahead of its official release next quarter...

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week into the Linux 6.3 kernel and include the initial Intel TPMI integration along with several other driver changes...

Following a small delay, Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS has been released as the latest point release for this current Long Term Support series for Ubuntu Linux...

While the Blender open-source 3D modeling software decided three years ago that they would aim for quarterly releases and so delivering four releases per year, they have now decided to shift to delivering just three releases per year...

The Network File-System (NFS) client and server changes have landed for the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel...

Google has published a list of the participating open-source organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates that also include the new accelerator "accel" subsystem updates have been submitted and subsequently merged for the Linux 6.3 kernel. This pull has a lot of changes to these kernel graphics drivers as well as the first two AI accelerator drivers as part of the new kernel area...

Intel's open-source Compute-Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support along with the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) had been on a rhythm of typically seeing new tagged releases every week or two... Quite nice and living up to the open-source development philosophy of "release early, release often." That persisted for a long time until Q4'22 when the releases became less frequent. In early December though the release train stopped and not until this morning has there been a new release of the Compute-Runtime and IGC...

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is one of the new features with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors but is limited this generation to deployment by a few select cloud partners. For Linux 6.3 this feature for hardware-isolated virtual machines is continuing to be further refined...

Fwupd 1.8.11 was released earlier today as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution largely used on Linux systems for flashing motherboard/system firmware as well as various peripherals/devices...

After a lengthy release cycle due to blocker bugs and delays in issuing new release candidates, Mesa 23.0 was released overnight as the newest version of this collection of open-source graphics drivers used on Linux and other platforms...

Intel engineers continue carrying out much of the upstream Linux kernel enablement for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem for supporting this high-speed open standard for servers. For the Linux 6.3 cycle is yet more feature work ready for the mainline kernel...

A patch series started by Intel to improve the Linux kernel's fair scheduler code, which has also seen testing/feedback from AMD engineers and other stakeholders, continues to be improved upon. The focus of this patch series is on avoiding too many cross-CPU wake-ups when they are unnecessary. In doing so, these patches help enhance the Linux performance particularly on high core count systems...

Autonomous driving technology company Mobileye has contributed to The Khronos Group an open-source OpenCL tensor and tiling library...

AMD today released xf86-video-amdgpu 23.0 as their first X.Org DDX display driver update in one year...

The Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation that was merged last year into Mesa 22.3 has been an extremely promising effort. One of the issues though is that with the current mainline state inside Mesa has lacked support for working with AMD Radeon GPUs via the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, but that is now coming to fruition...

The x86 CPU updates have been merged for the Linux 6.3 kernel that include a few new features worth mentioning for AMD and Intel customers...

A Phoronix reader pointed out that there are initial code that landed for adding RISC-V processor support to Microsoft's .NET runtime...

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 6.3 have been submitted and they contain a number of exciting input updates for this spring 2023 kernel version from the introduction of HID-BPF to native Steam Deck controller interface handling...

While Ubuntu Linux hasn't provided Flatpak support out-of-the-box due to their preference of using their own Snap app packaging/distribution format, Ubuntu flavors/spins have to this point been able to pre-install Flatpak support if they desired. However, for the 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" cycle and moving forward, Ubuntu flavors will no longer be permitted to install Flatpak packages by default...