Phoronix

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...

Longtime AMD open-source Linux graphics developer Marek Olšák is at it again with some interesting optimizations for RadeonSI Gallium3D and is eyeing at enabling OpenGL threading by default...

A number of noteworthy changes have begun queuing for the Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window opening up in just over one month...

GIMP 2.99.12 is out as a weekend surprise as the newest development release towards the GIMP 3.0 image manipulation program's release...

Debian has begun a general resolution process to solicit a vote by its stakeholders what to do with non-free firmware...

Earlier this month AMD posted Linux kernel patches preparing LbrExtV2 as updated Last Branch Record functionality being introduced with upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors. That LbrExtV2 support for the Linux kernel's "perf" subsystem has now been queued up in its respective branch ahead of the Linux 6.1 feature merge window beginning in early October...

As part of a broader effort to reduce system memory use on Ubuntu Linux particularly for server and container/cloud use-cases, Ubuntu 22.10's OpenSSH server has switched to using socket-based activation...

One of the questions that has come up following my AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Linux testing has been how well air-cooling is working out for the 280 Watt workstation CPU. Water cooling is, of course, most ideal but there are air coolers that can work out sufficiently too. Here are some quick reference results...

With the OpenMP 5.0 parallel programming specification there is the reverse offload capability for going from the offloaded device back to the system host. The GCC 13 open-source compiler is seeing work recently around supporting this functionality...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out early with his usual weekly development summary that highlights all of this prominent open-source desktop environment. Notable this week is KDE integrating support for re-binding extra mouse buttons as well as a lot of continued work on Discover...

NetworkManager 1.40 has been released as this widely-used software for configuring wired and wireless network interfaces under Linux...

Canonical has released a new version of Mir, their display server that now focuses on making it easy adapting new environments to use Wayland by being an adaptable Wayland compositor...

While we are about three years out from seeing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, it was announced today that the GTK2 toolkit will not be supported in that next major RHEL version...

In the year since Intel announced 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors there have been a number of patches tuning the Linux kernel's scheduler and other code to better deal with the mix of the performance and efficient cores. While that looked to be all buttoned up for a number of months now with Alder Lake CPUs performing well on Linux, another patch series further adjusting the Linux sched/fair code was published to help with these Intel hybrid processor designs...

While Intel GPUs support VESA Adaptive-Sync, for Arc Graphics Intel announced Smooth Sync as what amounts to a dithering filter to make screen tearing less of an issue when not running with vsync enabled or lacking an Adaptive-Sync display...

Meta/Facebook engineers have announced their work on THP Shrinker as a way for Linux's Transparent Hugepages (THP) to be more efficient and avoiding memory waste by removing under-utilized transparent hugepages...

Thanks to the work of independent developer Luke Jones and as part of his Asusctl Linux project, ASUS laptops continue seeing better feature support on Linux and with the v6.1 cycle kicking off in October are more ASUS ROG laptop enhancements that have been readied...

While LibreOffice has supported some input gestures in the past like swiping and long presses with the GTK front-end as well as some Android and iOS specific additions, it looks like greater gesture support is on the way for this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Intel GPUs from the consumer desktop Arc Graphics hardware to the Intel Data Center Flex GPU Series "Arctic Sound M" and forthcoming Xe HPC Ponte Vecchio are built around fully open-source drivers. A common misconception or confusion I've heard many times over the past number of months has been questioning whether Intel's discrete GPU driver support on Linux is open-source or is closed-source, etc. Well, it's fully open-source aside from the usual firmware caveat and running on Linux. Here is some initial commentary with running the Intel Arc Graphics A380 on Linux!

Lutris as the open-source game manager that integrates with the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other game collections and emulators is out with a new update...

Brought up back in 2020 was the readfile system call for efficiently reading small files with the intention of it being simple for reading small files such as those via sysfs, procfs, and similar file-systems. The readfile patches were re-based yesterday against the current Linux 6.0 state, leaving hope that the new system call might finally be sent in for the next kernel cycle...

The FreeBSD release engineering team has published their initial release plans for FreeBSD 14.0 as well as follow-on FreeBSD 13.2 and 12.4 releases for the current stable series of this BSD operating system...

While mostly of benefit to server administrators with large fleets of hardware, Linux 6.1 aims to make it easier to help spot problematic CPUs/cores by reporting the likely socket and core when a segmentation fault occurs, which can help in spotting any trends if routinely finding the same CPU/core is causing problems...

Async page flipping via DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC has been available with the Direct Rendering Manager's legacy API but hasn't been supported by the atomic mode-setting interface. However, a proposed patch series would add that atomic async flip support and wire it up initially for the AMDGPU DRM driver. Meanwhile Valve's Gamescope compositor in user-space would be ready to make use of it...

In addition to AMD-Xilinx working on new network driver code, a new DRM display driver, and other kernel features recently covered on Phoronix, they are also preparing upstream Linux kernel support for the "CDX" bus with their FPGA devices...

In addition to MGLRU being planned for Linux 6.1 as a big improvement to the page reclamation code and nice performance benefits, another memory management related change that has been floating on Andrew Morton's "mm-unstable" branch recently has been supporting explicit memory tiers and work around improving the Linux kernel's tiered memory support...

After being marked as obsolete in GCC 12, GNU Compiler Collection developers are now preparing to remove compiler support for the CompactRISC CR16 architecture in GCC 13...

While the Compiz compositing window manager isn't as popular as it was during its early days of adding animated "bling" to the Linux desktop or when it was in use by Ubuntu, there still are some users having fun with it and a handful of contributors making some maintenance and other progress to it...

AMD has merged video acceleration quality improvements into Mesa 22.3's Gallium3D VA front-end for benefiting open-source video acceleration on Radeon GPUs...

Intel's Arctic Sound M is being announced today as the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series.

Intel open-source engineers have readied their first batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" changes for DRM-Next of material they are preparing for introduction with the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle later this year...

Cemu is a popular emulator for the Nintendo Wii U that can successfully run many games as well as homebrew titles. Cemu started off with just Windows support but then at the beginning of the year laid out plans to go open-source and provide Linux support. They've pulled that off and the code is now out there in a public GitHub repository...

The current Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa supports graphics hardware going back to the "Gen7" graphics found with Ivy Bridge / Haswell. However, Intel open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are preparing to separate the old Ivy Bridge / Haswell (Gen7) and Broadwell (Gen8) graphics into a separate Mesa driver so they can better focus on improving their modern Vulkan driver that would then be limited to Skylake Gen9 graphics and newer...

The X.Org project "xisxwayland" is out with a new version of this simple program that can be easily called by shell scripts and other simple uses for checking to see whether the running X.Org Server is a genuine X11 server or more commonly these days an XWayland server running within a Wayland environment...

For speeding up the actual Mesa continuous integration (CI) process itself with frequently building new revisions of Mesa3D, their CI infrastructure is beginning to make use of the Mold linker as a high performance alternative to the GNU Gold and LLVM LLD linkers. This is yielding a "substantial" performance improvement in tests for being able to turnaround CI jobs faster and in turn allowing Mesa developers to be more efficient...

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb last year worked on Fwupd support for FreeBSD so system firmware updates can be more easily handled on that popular BSD operating system and leveraging the Fwupd/LVFS infrastructure that's been happening for years in the Linux space. Their most recent target is now DragonFlyBSD for handling of UEFI firmware updates with Fwupd...

One of the great things about Jason Ekstrand having joined Collabora at the start of the year is that the former Intel graphics engineer, who was on the team that created their original Vulkan driver, can now work on whatever open-source driver code he wishes. Among other upstream Mesa work, he's recently been contributing to the new "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan driver and also the RADV driver too...

Back in May there was a patch series by Google engineers working on encrypted hibernation support for Linux that would be protected by the platform hardware itself like with a TPM module as well as user authentication by a password or other means. Sent out today is a second revision to that Linux encrypted hibernation support...

As I've written about the past several weeks, AMD engineers have been preparing a Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver for Linux. The AMD Platform Management Framework for future hardware appears similar to Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) and designed to enhance the thermal/power performance of future platforms...

CodeWeavers today announced the availability of their Wine-based CrossOver 22 software for enjoying Windows applications and games atop Linux, ChromeOS, and macOS...

Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big "v2.0" release...

Earlier this year was the surprise announcement of Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa. That driver has since been mainlined in Mesa and the Imagination developers continue working on improving their Vulkan API coverage. Simultaneously they have been working on a proper, upstream-friendly open-source DRM/KMS kernel driver and that code now is far enough along that it's been sent out for initial review...

Sound Open Fimware is already four years old as what started out as Intel pushing for more open firmware around audio DSPs. Since then we've seen Mediatek begin to support "SOF" as well as some AMD hardware supporting Sound Open Firmware. Out today is SOF 2.2.1 as the latest from this open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella...

Mozilla is ready to ship Firefox 104.0 this morning as the latest incremental improvement to this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory...