Phoronix

There is a lot of last minute feature work and improvements heading into Plasma 5.26 ahead of its upcoming beta and feature freeze...

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin...

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel...

PipeWire 0.3.57 was released on Friday as the newest update to this Linux audio/video streams management solution that aims to fill the functionality currently provided by the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

The sdl12-compat is a SDL 1.2 compatibility layer implementation atop SDL 2.0. This sdl12-compat project allows for old, out-of-date games and other applications relying on the old SDL 1.2 interface to in turn run via the modern SDL2 library for better compatibility with input devices, Wayland support (assuming no direct X11 hard dependencies), support for PipeWire audio, improved input controls, and various other enhancements only found in SDL 2.0 and not the unmaintained SDL 1.2...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension...

Back in July Intel's Peter Zijlstra proposed "Call Depth Tracking" as a mitigation approach for handling Retbleed and avoiding the "performance horror show" of Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) usage. Out today is the newest version of the Call Depth Tracking code and the performance benchmark results are looking very promising for lessening the pain of the Retbleed CPU mitigation performance impact...

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus...

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel...

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days...

Stemming from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS activating systemd's out-of-memory daemon (systemd-oomd) and users finding their web browser being killed when facing memory or swap pressure, a change has been upstreamed in systemd to help alleviate this situation...

An independent contributor to the open-source Mesa 3D graphics project has begun eyeing AVX-512 support by the LLVMpipe software rasterizer due to AVX-512 being present with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors...

When currently using Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with their new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, it's simply been reported as "Intel{R} Graphics" for the product/renderer string. With the latest Mesa 22.3-devel work and for back-porting to the current stable series, the graphics card models are beginning to be properly reported...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2022 that show a slight increase to Linux gaming as part of the overall marketshare on a percentage basis...

For those planning to stick to the Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Long-Term Support series still for some time before moving to the newer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is available today as the newest point release in that older series...

Earlier this year AMD's GPUOpen team announced the Orochi project for dynamic HIP/CUDA run-time handling. Orochi makes it easier for application developers to ship AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA support within a single code-base / binary that is then selected at run-time based on the GPU in use...

Vulkan 1.3.226 is out this morning and to much excitement adds the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension as cross-vendor functionality for mesh shaders!..

With the Apple M2 running Asahi Linux you may be wondering whether it's better to use the GCC compiler as is the default on upstream Arch Linux or whether going for LLVM Clang will yield better performance given all the LLVM/Clang usage by AArch64 vendors, including Apple's own Xcode compiler toolchain making use of it. If you are wondering about GCC vs. Clang for building binaries on the Apple M2, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite...

Inspired by Microsoft's compiler toolchain having a "std:c++latest" option for automatically targeting the latest supported C++ spec, GCC compiler developers have been discussing the possibility of a similar feature with the ability to specify -std=c++current for the current C++ standard or -std=c++future for the future/draft specification...

One of the interesting capabilities with Thunderbolt and now USB4 that is seemingly not too widely used is for networking between systems. The Linux kernel for the past half-decade already has offered a Thunderbolt networking driver for networking between hosts with Thunderbolt cables. The latest improvement on this front is now supporting USB4's end-to-end flow control mode...

For the open-source software popular for screen-casting and videogame live-streaming, OBS Studio 28.0 was released today as a big feature update...

During the month of August on Phoronix there were 260 original news stories and Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux / open-source readers the most this month...

Genode OS as the open-source operating system framework based on a micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components is out with its newest feature release. A big focus this cycle has been on making Genode OS more practical as a smartphone operating system...

For those running the embedded OpenWrt Linux operating system for routers and other networking devices or just running a memory-constrained MIPS Linux system, the forthcoming Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" kernel feature is looking very good on that front...

QEMU 7.1 is now available as the latest feature release for this processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

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...