Phoronix

The first beta of OpenVPN 2.6 is now available and it's a big one for those using this cross-platform, virtual private network (VPN) system...

The Asahi Linux distribution is now shipping an early, alpha quality graphics driver stack for the Apple M1/M2 SoCs. This work-in-progress driver consists of their experimental Rust-written DRM kernel driver and then the AGX Gallium3D code in Mesa that is currently targeting OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support...

In addition to today seeing the GCC Rust front-end being declared ready for merging with its latest patch series sent out today, the Modula-2 front-end sent out its third revision which is also expected to now be merged as another new programming language front-end for GCC 13...

Among the many exciting new features in Linux 6.1 is the merging of the Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" code as what has shaped up to be one of the best kernel innovations for 2022 for overhauling the Linux kernel's page reclamation code. The performance results already are very promising and MGLRU is being used successfully at Google and other large deployments. The work isn't over though on further advancing the kernel in this area...

Among the early pull requests sent out already ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window opening next week is a change to enable "-funsigned-char" by default for Linux kernel builds. In preparation for this compiler flag change several fixes have already landed along with a lot of early testing, so any fallout is hoped to be minimal...

Back in October AMD sent out their initial Zen 4 "znver4" enablement for the GCC compiler. That initial Zen 4 support was since merged for GCC 13 but that initial enablement carried over the cost tables from Zen 3 and didn't do much in the way of tuning but rather just flipping on the new instructions supported by the Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors. Today there is finally some juicy tuning patches being sent out for GCC...

The GCC Rust front-end that provides very preliminary support for the Rust programming language atop the GNU Compiler Collection is now cleared for merging to the mainline codebase!..

FEX-Emu is the open-source software project working on speedy x86/x86_64 software emulation on AArch64. FEX-Emu is one of the leading options for running x86 binaries on 64-bit Arm and has matured enough for allowing Linux games and Steam Play titles to run on Arm. FEX 2212 is out as the newest shiny feature update to this promising software...

One of the big undertakings this year within the (open)SUSE camp has been the YaST team's work on D-Installer as their next-generation operating system installer. This week they have published a new prototype of this installer with more functionality now in place...

Ahead of LibreOffice 7.5 expected to be released in February, today marks the availability of the first alpha build available for testing...

For FreeBSD users not yet on the FreeBSD 13 stable series, FreeBSD 12.4 is now available as the newest point release to that N-1 series...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor...

Armbian 22.11 is now available as the Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distribution popular with ARM development boards and supporting a wide range of hardware from different vendors...

Back during the summer once Asahi Linux introduced initial Apple M2 SoC support I ran many Apple M2 Linux benchmarks including a look at how the M2 competes with AMD and Intel laptop processors. With months having passed since then and the Apple M1/M2 Linux support has continued to advance upstream as well as more work hitting the Asahi Linux tree, here is a fresh look at where the performance of the M2 is currently at compared to that initial at-launch support.

Released this morning is Intel IGC 1.0.12504.5 for Linux and Windows systems as the newest version of the open-source Intel Graphics Compiler. As the first tagged update in nearly two months, IGC 1.0.12504.5 is a big one...

PoCL 3.1 is out today as the newest feature update to the "Portable Computing Language" that is effectively a portable OpenCL implementation that originally began focused on being a CPU-based implementation of OpenCL and has grown to support additional back-end drivers via LLVM for targeting NVIDIA CUDA, an experimental Vulkan driver, and other accelerator targets...

Last month I wrote about Intel having worked on USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect handling for the Linux kernel and those patches are indeed primed to be introduced next week with the Linux 6.2 merge window...

As we get ready to enter 2023, the Linux kernel's floppy disk driver is still being maintained...

While X.Org Katamari releases are no longer being organized to bundle up all of the different X11 software components behind one version number and some X.Org software pieces are seeing very seldom updates every number of years, this past week has seen twenty new X.Org software releases...

There isn't too much interest in Solaris these days and the once vibrant open-source (Open)Solaris community is a small fraction of its past, but OpenIndiana Hipster continues pushing forward as the operating system forked from OpenSolaris and now serves as a distribution derived from the Illumos code-base...

As was expected following an uptick in kernel patches mid-to-late in the cycle, Linus Torvalds today opted to issue Linux 6.1-rc8 rather than going straight to the stable release for Linux 6.1, which is also expected to serve as this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel...

Ahead of the Linux 6.1-rc8 kernel that Linus Torvalds is expected to issue shortly rather than going straight to Linux 6.1 stable, a revert for a small change leading to "huge performance regressions" in select areas has fortunately been caught and reverted...

A new release of Polychromatic is now available, the open-source GUI front-end for managing Razer devices on Linux by way of the community-managed OpenRazer drivers...

Thanks to the ongoing work led by Intel's Linux engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel will feature more feature work around enabling Compute Express Link (CXL) functionality...

The newest Apache software project hitting the version 1.0 milestone is the Apache IoTDB as a time-series database focused on serving as a database to the Internet of Things (IoT)...

With SDL 3.0 in development and it taking a more modern focus and doing away with various pieces of old code, one of the latest chunks of code being retired is the OpenGL ES 1.0 2D render path...

CUPS print server lead developer Michael Sweet has announced the release of PAPPL 1.3, his printer application framework to help in developing CUPS Printer Applications as replacements to conventional printer drivers...

Intel's oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" is preparing to embark on its v3.0 release that improves performance not only for current and upcoming Intel hardware but also furthers along the NVIDIA and AMD support too...

It's been an exciting start to December in the KDE world...

Greg Kroah-Hartman released a trio of stable kernel updates this morning that are notable in part for having mitigated the recently disclosed i915 driver security issue affecting Intel "Gen12" graphics from Tigerlake integrated graphics up through the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics...

With the Linux 6.1 kernel due to be released in the next week, Mesa 23.0-devel continuing to see a lot of improvements land for RADV and RadeonSI, and the NVIDIA R525 Linux driver series being available, here is a fresh look at the AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming performance with various graphics cards and an assortment of Linux games -- both native and via Valve's Steam Play.

While the Sway Wayland compositor has long been available via the Fedora package repositories, Sway fans within the Fedora space are hoping that Fedora 38 will ship with a Fedora Sway spin being available for an easy and out-of-the-box experience for running this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

With the new Mesa 22.3 release one of the changes for vintage hardware users is the introduction of "HasVK" as a Vulkan driver forked from Intel's ANV codebase...

The lightweight Xfce 4.18 desktop is planning to release in two weeks while out now is the Xfce 4.18 Pre2 development milestone...

For those looking to enjoy the ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD platforms, OpenZFS 2.1.7 is now available...

Valve just posted their November 2022 Steam Survey results and it shows the Linux gaming marketshare continue to climb, driven by the success of their Arch Linux powered Steam Deck handheld gaming console...

Intel engineers have been busy bringing up Meteor Lake support for Linux from the improved integrated graphics to other areas of this next-gen Core processor that will eventually succeed Raptor Lake. In addition to heavy and ongoing work with the i915 kernel graphics driver, the initial Meteor Lake support has been merged now for Mesa...

It's been a while since trying out the BSD operating systems on bleeding-edge hardware while a Phoronix Premium recently asked about the BSDs on Raptor Lake. Well, here are my initial experiences trying to run FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD on the Intel Core i9 13900K desktop...

The past few months there has been a change proposal discussed around adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default compilation flags for packages being built for Fedora Linux. Adding this option would improve the profiling/debug-ability of the packages but with possible performance implications. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now rejected this contentious change proposal...

While NVIDIA users have been enjoying hardware ray-tracing with the Blender 3D modelling software for years with the OptiX back-end and RTX GPUs, the ray-tracing support for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics is still coming together for this industry-standard, open-source 3D modelling software...

With November now in the books, here is a look back at the most popular original open-source/Linux content on Phoronix from the 245 original articles written by your's truly over the past month. It was an extremely exciting month given the launch of the AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors with up to 96 cores per socket, AVX-512, and with all of the improvements meant outright insane generational improvement and currently slaughtering the competition. The Linux 6.1 kernel nearing the limelight, early development work on Linux 6.2, and the continued embracing of the Rust programming language by the open-source ecosystem all made for an interesting November...

NixOS as the Linux distribution built atop the purely-functional and declarative Nix package manager is out with a new release to kickoff December...

Intel engineers have published their "2022Q3" patch queue for FFmpeg along with a "2022Q4 RC1" set too for representing the latest yet-to-be-merged patches for improving FFmpeg video acceleration with Intel graphics...

Developers behind the Genode open-source operating system framework that uses a micro-kernel design have released their v22.11 update...

Yesterday marked new releases of the SVT-AV1 and Rav1e open-source AV1 video encoders...

Mesa 22.3 is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics driver components...

While several X.Org DDX drivers in the past have implemented a "TearFree" xorg.conf driver option to try to eliminate screen tearing when running an X.Org Server without a composited environment, the xf86-video-modesetting generic DDX that is widely used has lacked that option. That is until a developer finally stepped up and has pending support for the "TearFree" option...

Last month when the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 reached retail availability, there was open-source support available for Linux users assuming you were on a new enough kernel and Mesa release plus having to activate the preliminary/experimental hardware support flag. In the time since the open-source Intel dGPU Linux graphics driver support has continued to mature and with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel is where DG2/Alchemist graphics have been promoted to stable / supported out-of-the-box. Given this milestone and the upstream Mesa code for the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers continuing to mature, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 under Linux.

Following several ROCm 5.3 point releases, AMD today shipped ROCm 5.4 as the newest version of their open-source Linux GPU compute stack...

Here's a last call that if you wanted to participate in this year's Black Friday / Cyber Monday holiday deal to help support Phoronix, today is the last day of the sale...