Phoronix

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...

LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like the Clang compiler are now under a feature freeze and branched from the main code-base ahead of the stable 15.0 release in September...

The OpenMandriva crew behind this long ago Mandriva/Mandrake-derived distribution announced their Lx ROME technical preview release as their rolling release version of the operating system...

Last month KDE Plasma 5.25 released as the newest feature release to this Qt-based open-source desktop environment. Unfortunately for FreeBSD desktop users, those using KDE will be stuck for a while longer on Plasma 5.24 due to missing security infrastructure...

There are a few Fedora Spins/Labs versions at risk of being removed with Fedora 37 this autumn unless new maintainers step up...

Oracle has issued its newest quarterly release of GraalVM as its high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional execution models and programming languages. GraalVM 22.2 is this newest version and contains a number of different optimizations for its growing number of components...

Mesa's Turnip driver that provides open-source Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors continues maturing nicely and is approaching Vulkan 1.3 conformance...

Mozilla's Firefox 103 web browser is now available from mirrors as the latest monthly update to this open-source, cross-platform browser...

The "THP_SWAP" option for the Linux kernel allows swapping transparent huge-pages in one piece without splitting. With Linux 5.20 the 64-bit Arm kernel (ARM64 / AArch64) will now support this option as a performance optimization...

For the past several years Latte Dock has been a popular macOS-like "dock" for the KDE Plasma desktop but development has now ceased...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as an interactive, ray-traced visualizer that was added to their oneAPI software suite and powered by their OSPRay engine. Released on Monday was the latest update to this open-source program...

Earlier this year I wrote about the Intel Idle driver support being prepared for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs but a limitation with these forthcoming Xeon Scalable processors was that C1 and C1E c-states handling are now mutually exclusive. Unlike earlier Xeon processors, C1 and C1E states couldn't be enabled at the same time. Fortunately, via new Intel firmware they have managed to overcome this limitation...

After years in the works, the "PREEMPT_RT" support for building a real-time Linux kernel might finally be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle if the last few remaining bits are reviewed/signed-off on in time for next week's merge window...

NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations...

Last week when posting my initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U performance (and also looking at the AMD Rembrandt Windows vs. Linux speed), there were two main areas to get excited about with these AMD Zen 3+ SoCs: nice power efficiency improvements across many real-world workloads and the graphics upgrade with the integrated Radeon 680M. In this article are more tests of the Radoen 680M graphics looking at the integrated graphics speed-up with RDNA2 finally replacing Vega as a big upgrade and also how this compares to the Intel Alder Lake P Xe Graphics performance for Linux laptops.

ByteDance as the Chinese company behind TikTok has been working on a number of Linux kernel optimizations the past few years and their most recent work is for faster Kexec rebooting of the kernel. With their massive fleet of servers powering TikTok and other apps, they will do whatever they can to shave milliseconds off the boot/reboot time of their servers and that is what most of their Linux optimizations have been about -- including this newest patch series for faster Kexec reboots...

Samsung has posted a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling their Trinity neural processing unit (NPU) hardware as accelerators found within some of their embedded systems. Samsung Trinity NPUs have been in use since 2018 and their newer Trinity "TRIV2" accelerator is found within the latest Samsung TVs for AI purposes. Samsung hopes to upstream this new Linux driver simply named "trinity" into the mainline kernel...

Intel and MediaTek have just announced a strategic partnership where some future chips for MediaTek will be manufactured by Intel Foundry Services (IFS)...

The VKMS driver within the Linux kernel allows for virtual kernel mode-setting as a software-only KMS/DRM driver that can be used for virtual testing purposes and other uses around headless systems. New patches out of Google are working on ConfigFS support for this virtual display driver and from there making it easy to build out your own virtual graphics device configuration with VKMS...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle the RISC-V CPU architecture's default kernel configuration "defconfig" is being tweaked so it's capable of running Docker out-of-the-box...

As was expected given all the recent kernel activity, Linux 5.19-rc8 was released today rather than going straight to the Linux 5.19 stable release, which has been diverted now to next Sunday. Linux 5.19-rc8 ships with many last minute fixes for this summer 2022 kernel update...

Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks...

While normally big CPU security mitigation work done behind closed-doors is in good shape for the vulnerability embargo date, Retbleed has been an exception. Nearly two weeks since Retbleed was made public, the Linux kernel patches around it continue with more now sent in today ahead of Linux 5.19-rc8 to address fallout from the mitigation handling...

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations...

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality...

While relevant Intel and AMD processors have been mitigated for the recent Retbleed security vulnerability affecting older generations of processors, those mitigations currently just work for x86_64 kernels and will not work if running an x86 (32-bit) kernel on affected hardware. But it's unlikely to get fixed unless some passionate individual steps up as the upstream developers and vendors have long since moved on to just caring about x86_64...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...

Linux 5.20 is adding Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to the MSM DRM/KMS driver and now the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is also enabling that A619 GPU support which in turn enables open-source OpenGL acceleration on devices like the Fairphone 4...

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Toshiba's Visconti SoC provides an optimized image recognition processor and geared for advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solutions for automobiles and similar modern use-cases. Toshiba engineers are now publishing patches for their DNN image processing accelerator driver with hopes of getting the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Since last year Microsoft has been working on Direct3D 12 video acceleration for Mesa so that Windows Subsystem for Linux can run common applications targeting the VA-API video acceleration API and ultimately enjoy GPU-based video acceleration by way of Direct3D 12. After the initial video encode/decode support for D3D12 was merged to Mesa earlier this year, the latest Microsoft contribution is now handling of video engine based effects...

Released last month was AMD ROCm 5.2 for the company's open-source Linux GPU compute stack while out today is the v5.2.1 point release...

When it comes to compressing textures using the Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) format that is supported by the OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan APIs, Arm's ASTC Encoder has long reigned supreme. Out today is ASTC-Encoder 4.0 as the latest performance-boosting update to this open-source compressor...

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers continue to be very busy polishing the DG2/Alchemist graphics card support for forthcoming Intel Arc Graphics hardware... Merged today to the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was a ray-tracing focused fix that yields "like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Even more of a kicker? The change is one line of code for the massive improvement...

Released today was Vulkan 1.3.222 as the newest Vulkan spec with various clarifications/corrections plus two new extensions coming out of Qualcomm...