Phoronix

While approaching the end of summer, there's no breaks at Phoronix and over the course of August were 240 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is a look back at what was most exciting for the month...

Released nearly one year ago was GNU Wget2 2.0 as a big improvement over Wget to support more protocols like HTTP/2, enabling multi-threading support and parallel connections, and a range of other feature additions. Published on Thursday was Wget2 2.1 as the newest step forward for this much-improved Wget open-source downloading solution...

In addition to NFSD bringing a thrilling feature for Linux 6.6 in the form of NFSv4 write delegation support, the NFS client code for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel also has a notable feature change...

Following the releases this week of Intel's SVT-AV1 1.7 encoder and the libavif 1.0 AV1 Image File Format release, Google engineers are out with libaom 3.7 as the newest feature release to that AV1 encode library...

The Intel Shadow Stack support that is part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) has finally been merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel after it was previously rejected by Linus Torvalds...

The Linux mitigation for the Intel Gather Data Sampling (GDS) "Downfall" vulnerability was updated to reflect all Skylake and Kabylake CPUs being vulnerable to this nasty issue. Due to those Skylake client processors reaching the end of their official support life at Intel, the original Linux mitigation for GDS/Downfall didn't properly protect those older Core processor models...

Chuck Lever III of Oracle has submitted the NFSD changes for Linux 6.6 for this NFS server of which he is particularly thrilled about one of the new features this cycle...

With the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel adding support for more upcoming Radeon graphics processors, that means more auto-generated header files for the new IP blocks... I was curious to see the overall size now of the AMDGPU kernel driver along with its associated code like the AMDKFD compute driver. It's now above 5 million lines for the kernel driver portion...

The first release candidate of PHP 8.3 is now available for testing this annual feature release...

As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as "Supported" but is officially treated as "Obsolete" within the Linux kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel to provide new features for the number of kernel graphics drivers and other AI accelerator drivers within the mainline kernel...

A pull request was sent out this week to introduce the GenPD subsystem and add a new drivers/genpd area for the GenPD provider drivers to the kernel... To which Linus Torvalds wonders what the heck is a "GenPD" as probably most of you are also wondering about...

As part of the long ongoing effort around Wine Wayland support for upstream in order to be able to utilize Wayland directly without a reliance on XWayland when running Windows games/apps, the sixth part to that enablement has been posted for review...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window...

There are some notable changes around the XFS file-system for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel, including a new release manager taking over duties...

Moving forward Google engineers are working to roll-out new Chrome stable releases even faster...

For those making use of the IntelliJ integrated development environment (IDE), JetBrains has been working to enable native Wayland support...

The various Arm platform and SoC changes have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window...

While I have been eagerly following the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU initialization that will eventually replace AGESA, today AMD announced a new open-source firmware drop: the SEV firmware has been made open-source...

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are working on a new set of interfaces for user-space to support OverDrive overclocking. While AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking has been supported on Linux for years, the current interface isn't sufficient for all the power/overclocking controls moving forward...

Some code cleaning within the sysctl space of the Linux kernel will eventually eliminate around 64 bytes of bloat per array within the kernel where a sentinel can be removed...

While we are eagerly awaiting ROCm support for more RDNA3 GPUs said to be coming later this calendar year, shipping Tuesday night was ROCm 5.6.1 as the newest point release for this open-source GPU compute stack...

MidnightBSD 3.1 is now available for this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-forked operating system that aims to be "the BSD for everyone" with an Xfce-based desktop and focus on ease of use...

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) has been part of the mainline kernel for two decades to provide a security module implementing access control security policies and is now widely-used for enhancing the security of production Linux servers and other systems. Those that haven't been involved with Linux for a long time may be unaware that SELinux originates from the US National Security Agency (NSA). But now with Linux 6.6 the NSA references are being removed...

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver...

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features...

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms...

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are a number of core networking improvements this cycle, support for various new wired and wireless chipsets, and improvements made to existing Ethernet and WiFi drivers...

To help harden the Linux kernel from memory vulnerabilities and in particular heap spraying, set to be merged into the Linux 6.6 kernel is optional support for randomized slab caches for kmalloc() calls...

The EEVDF scheduler code has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel. EEVDF replaces the existing CFS scheduler code. There is the likelihood of some performance regressions initially though but the developers will be working to address them as they arise. Additionally, this scheduler pull also re-introduces cluster scheduling for Intel Core hybrid processors...

Among the exciting early pull requests to land in the new Linux 6.6 kernel cycle are some nice improvements to the IOmap code that should yield some substantive I/O benefits with this new kernel...

Google is using their NEXT'23 conference today to announce that C3A instances are debuting in private preview form for these new AArch64 VMs powered by AmpereOne processors...

ClamAV 1.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform anti-virus engine currently maintained by Cisco Systems...

The Intel-led SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder is out with a major release that delivers on more performance improvements across the board...

Btrfs in Linux 6.5 brought various performance improvements and prior to that it was a busy cycle with Linux 6.4 while now with Linux 6.6 the Btrfs file-system driver is mostly centered on delivering fixes...

The Alliance For Open Media has released libavif 1.0, the reference library for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) with image encode and decode support...

For HotChips 2023, Intel has made some new disclosures around Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest.

Over the summer AMD Linux engineers began sending kernel patches for Family 1Ah (Family 26) processors that almost surely are for next-gen Zen 5 processors. Among the initial bits sent out for this next-generation AMD CPU Family are HWMON temperature monitoring and EDAC reporting, which are now on their way for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

The Firefox 117 release binaries are now available for download ahead of Mozilla's official announcement going out on Tuesday...

The CentOS ISA special interest group (SIG) has been evaluating the performance of CentOS Stream in the event its x86_64 baseline were to be raised from x86-64-v2 to x86-64-v3. Currently CentOS Stream 9 targets x86-64-v2 but in upping the support requirements to x86-64-v3, it would allow the ability to engage AVX/AVX2 by default and make use of other newer instruction set features. The x86-64-v3 baseline roughly correlates to Intel / AMD CPUs from 2015 and newer...

Back in April AMD Linux engineers posted enabling a new CPU feature called Dynamic Boost Control to be found with some unspecified Ryzen SoCs for tuning the processor cores for optimal performance. The Dynamic Boost Control functionality depends upon the AMD Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) / Platform Security Processor (PSP) and this functionality was submitted today as part of the crypto updates for Linux 6.6...

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.5, GNU Linux-libre 6.5-gnu is now available for this downstream kernel maintained by the Free Software Foundation Latin America crew that removes support for binary-only kernel modules and stripping out other kernel code that depends on non-free-software microcode/firmware and other elements not deemed in the interests of pure free software...

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a student developer took the initiative in working on an automated Gentoo Linux system updater to help begineers and ease the roll-out of security updates to users...

As part of the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) updates submitted today for the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a quirk/workaround for dealing with current AMD Zen systems where a processor bug could lead to erroneously increased error severity and unneeded kernel panics...

In addition to the fchmodat2 system call, another early pull request submitted by Microsoft's Christian Brauner even before the Linux 6.5 kernel was released is one to introduce multi-grained timestamps with Linux 6.6. Multi-grained timestamps are intended to address an issue exhibited with NFS around caching and the current coarse-grained timestamp handling used for (in)validating caches...

While at the start of Linux 6.5 cycle Linus Torvalds was concerned this release "may be one of those releases that may drag out", in the end it is releasing today and right on schedule. Linux 6.5 was just published rather than going into overtime without any extra release candidate...

While Ampere Computing's wares with the Altra (Max) and forthcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors are designed for the data center, if you feel so inclined they have published a guide on being able to run Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors -- including Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on these Linux servers...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 stable kernel being released there have already been a few pull requests submitted of new feature material for Linux 6.6. Among the early pulls for v6.6 is one from prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner at Microsoft that introduces the fchmodat2() system call as an evolution of fchmodat()...

The Flatpak open-source app sandboxing tech has merged support for the Wayland security context protocol...

While there are many exciting features with Linux 6.5 which will hopefully be released as stable later today, ahead for the imminent Linux 6.6 merge window are another hearty batch of new features set to be introduced...