Phoronix

Coreboot 4.20 has been released as the newest feature release for this project continuing to provide open-source system firmware/BIOS for Chromebooks, servers, and a range of laptops and desktops...

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the small but useful VK_EXT_tooling_info extension...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.8 is the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend that carries hundreds of extra patches atop this open-source software for leveraging Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.4 cycle...

In addition to Microsoft having a significant present at last week's Linux Security Summit, there were also multiple Microsoft engineers at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit that was also taking place in Vancouver. Among the Microsoft Linux talks this week was a presentation on the Linux kernel usage by WSL2 -- including how it's moving closer to a mainline/upstream status and also mentions of Linux kernel features loved by Microsoft's engineering team...

Sent out this morning were the x86/urgent patches for the Linux 6.4-rc2 kernel due for release later today. With the x86/urgent changes this week are just two AMD patches in preparing the kernel for Family 19h Model 78h processors...

As part of the Red Hat layoffs announced in April with around a 4% reduction in headcount for the IBM-owneed company, one of the surprising casualties from that round of cost-cutting is the Fedora Program Manager...

Tellusim as the company known so far for its GravityMark benchmark and being started by Alexander Zapryagaev who was a Unigine Corp co-founder has now launched the Tellusim Core SDK as a new cross-platform, commercial engine...

A status update was posted this week around xfwm4-wayland with the Xfce Wayland compositor code...

GNU Shepherd 0.10 is out today as the latest release for this GNU-backed service manager and init system that is written in Guile...

This week alongside several other Linux Foundation events in Vancouver was the Linux Security Summit. Commanding a significant presence at the Linux Security Summit was Microsoft...

Following yesterday's release of Fwupd 1.8.15, Fwupd 1.9.1 is now available as the latest release of this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems...

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future...

Well, this is a bit strange... Intel just published Friday afternoon CPU microcode updates for all supported processor families back to Coffee Lake "Gen 8" for undisclosed security updates...

Wine 8.8 is out as another bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, Chrome OS, and other platforms...

Back in February was a patch series proposed retiring the Intel Itanium (IA-64) architecture support from the Linux kernel. That removal has yet to take place in Linux Git but it's still being talked about and user-space developers are also eager as it would mean being able to clear out Itanium user-space code too...

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 1.8.15 with fixes and allowing some additional devices to now enjoy firmware updating under Linux...

One of the fascinating elements of Intel's oneAPI software effort is how open they have been not to just supporting GPUs from multiple vendors or AMD CPUs too, but cross-CPU architecture support. Many Intel oneAPI components end up working on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and even IBM POWER. The latest Intel software package seeing 64-bit ARM Linux support is their Embree ray-tracing kernels...

While the past week saw many KDE developers get together for a Plasma 6.0 development sprint in Bavaria, the development pace for code changes during this time period didn't lighten up. There still was a lot of code being committed for continuing to advance this open-source desktop environment...

DXVK 2.2 is now available as a big update to this open-source software for mapping the Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs to Vulkan and the first major release since DXVK 2.1 shipped back in January...

Last month NVIDIA published RTX-Remix v0.1 for bringing path tracing to classic games. Out today is RTX-Remix v0.2 with more improvements to this tech plus they have now open-sourced the RTX Runtime Bridge as well...

The LibreOffice 7.6 Alpha build is now available for testing this next major feature release for this open-source, cross-platform free software office suite...

With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the SLOB allocator is removed while next the plan is for the deprecation and eventual removal of the SLAB allocator...

Today was the big reveal of ASUS' ROG Ally with the specifications and pricing in full for this new gaming handheld that will be shipping on 13 June...

For those wondering how the recent releases of the Clang 16 and GCC 13 are competing for the fastest generated binaries of these leading open-source compilers, here is a fresh round of benchmarks from an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system looking at the performance for a variety of C/C++ workloads built under each of these compilers.

The folks at System76 have published a new blog post that summarizes their software progress over the course of April on further advancing their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment...

The ISC DHCP software was marked end-of-life at the end of 2022 and thus Ubuntu Linux developers have been deciding on a new isc-dhcp-client package replacement to use by default...

Since Linux 5.18 there has been Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) in the mainline kernel that was contributed by Intel as part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). For Linux 6.4 Intel engineers tried to get the Shadow Stack support mainlined as the other part of CET, but issues were uncovered at the last minute. Hopefully Shadow Stack support will be merged for the v6.5 cycle but beyond that host support, Intel engineers have also been working on CET virtualization for enabling these security features for use within virtual machines...

An initial batch of DRM-Misc-Next patches targeting the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer were sent today to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of that next merge window...

Following the recent Plasma 6 developer sprint in Bavaria is an update on the achievements from that KDE developer event. KDE developer Nate Graham published a blog post today that focuses on some of the default changes intended for Plasma 6.0, including hopes of being able to use the Wayland session by default...

AlmaLinux 9.2 is now available for this community-driven, freely-available alternative to upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2. The AlmaLinux crew managed to deliver this release just hours after Red Hat reached general availability on RHEL 9.2 and RHEL 8.8...

Mesa 23.1 has been released as this quarter's feature release for this collection of open-source, user-space graphics components that primarily consist of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

In development for over a half-decade already has been Bcachefs as a copy-on-write (CoW) file-system born originally out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. On Tuesday the Bcachefs patch series was sent out for review and hopeful inclusion into the kernel by lead developer Kent Overstreet...

Going back to last year there's been AMD GFX940 work within the LLVM compiler for its AMDGPU compiler back-end. That AMD GFX940 should align to the Instinct MI300 while introduced to the latest LLVM compiler code today are new GFX941 and GFX942 targets...

Going back to last August were Intel patches to help Intel hybrid CPU handling on Linux by avoiding unnecessary task migrations within SMT domains. Coming this summer those Intel patches are finally set to arrive with the Linux 6.5 kernel cycle...

A new version of Lighttpd is out today, the BSD-licensed, open-source web server that focuses on being very speedy and lightweight on CPU and memory resources...

Following the Corsair MP700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD review under Linux with many readers being surprised by file-system errors when not adding extra cooling like the motherboard's passive M.2 heatsink and being curious about the situation myself, here are more tests of ultimately how this drive will reliably hit file-system errors in three minutes or less without added cooling...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver within Mesa is now enabling graphics pipeline libraries (GPL) functionality by default but at the same time has demoted their Vulkan mesh shader functionality to being hidden behind an environment variable until some unexplained hangs can be sorted out...

While DXVK is used by Steam Play for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan and there is also VKD3D-Proton for Direct3D 12 on Vulkan, D8VK's aim is for the aging Microsoft Direct3D 8 API atop Vulkan for enhancing the experience of older games on Linux...

Alpine Linux 3.18 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built with musl libc and Busybox while being popular for embedded and container use-cases...

Last week Corsair announced the MP700 series as their first PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives. While the performance is quite speedy for sequential reads and writes, in practice this drive struggled under Linux with real-world workloads. When not adding an after-market heatsink, the MP700 was quick to exhibit EXT4 file-system errors.

Intel today published 38 new security advisories in their first Patch Tuesday roundabout since February. Among the new disclosures today are CVE-2023-28410 as an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability that could lead to local privilege escalation...

While Intel's in-development Xe kernel graphics driver is focused on supporting Tigerlake/Gen12 graphics and newer integrated/discrete graphics with this modern open-source driver with many design improvements over the aging i915 kernel driver, there looks to be one feature that as currently positioned will be missing for DG2/Alchemist: HuC support for helping with media offloading...

Sadly missing out on the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window by a few days is support for sensor monitoring with the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E Hero motherboard...

Adding to the list of features coming with QEMU 8.1 is now having a native PipeWire audio back-end...

While missing out on the recently-closed Linux 6.4 merge window, one of the patch series seeing a lot of activity in recent weeks/months has been around parallel CPU bring-up in order to speed-up the Linux kernel boot process for today's high-end desktops and many-core servers...

Mozilla is officially releasing Firefox 113 today and as usual the release binaries are already available for this monthly web browser update...

While there are sadly many tech layoffs happening, one company that continues hiring at least on the Linux side is AMD. A new job posting was made today with AMD looking to recruit another developers to work on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack -- in particular, with the AMD Radeon Mesa code...

With Linux 6.4-rc1 released, here is my original overview of all the interesting changes coming for the Linux 6.4 kernel that will be released as stable at the end of June or in early July.