Phoronix

Masahiro Yamada submitted today all of the Kconfig feature updates targeting the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the Kconfig work is the "make xconfig" GUI seeing a port for Qt6 toolkit compatibility...

Mesa 23.2 was supposed to have been released by now following a series of weekly release candidates that started in mid-July when feature work ended. After a five week hiatus, Mesa 23.2-rc3 is now available for testing...

AMD by way of their Xilinx acquisition has been running the Open Hardware Competition since 2015 for helping to drive new innovations around FPGAs and the ACAP compute platform. The winners of the AMD Open Hardware Competition 2023 were recently announced...

PoCL began as an open-source project providing a CPU-based OpenCL implementation and over the years has added support for various LLVM back-ends such as for targeting AMD HSA, Intel Level Zero, and NVIDIA CUDA/PTX with its OpenCL implementation. The latest back-end merged ahead of Portable Computing Language 5.0 is a remote back-end that allows for OpenCL codes to be transparently utilized on networked systems for distributed computing...

Following Intel's acquisition of Tower Semiconductor falling through due to failing to obtain all the necessary regulatory approvals, Intel and Tower today announced a foundry agreement...

The sound subsystem and audio driver updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window. Interesting about the sound work this cycle is a fair amount of work around AMD Van Gogh platforms, which so far is just the APU that's known to power Valve's Steam Deck...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.15 is a new version of Hangover, the Wine-based software that aims to ease the deployment of Wine with x86/x86_64 Windows software support atop AArch64 processors and other CPU architectures...

One of the patches to be picked up by the Linux 6.6 kernel this week brings back REP MOSQ for user-access on CPUs without Enhanced REP MOVSB (ERMS) support. In turn this can equate to some performance benefits on AMD CPUs lacking ERMS...

Manjaro 23.0 "Uranos" has been released as the latest version of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

The decision last month for the Linux kernel to disable random number generation (RNG) for all AMD fTPMs ended up having some unintended consequences on Intel systems that ended up breaking S3 suspend behavior...

Microsoft continues improving the Hyper-V support within the Linux kernel for benefiting Linux guest VMs running within this hypervisor on Windows. With Linux 6.6 the Hyper-V code adds support for SEV-SNP secure guests on the AMD EPYC side while over on the Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids side is initial support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) protected guests...

It's been nearly four months since the release of DXVK 2.2 for this Direct3D 9/10/11 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Out today is DXVK 2.3 as the latest major step forward for the project...

The ACPI and power management updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel...

Released at the end of August was GNU Coreutils 9.4 while out this weekend is uutils 0.0.21 as the open-source, Rust-written re-implementation of the Coreutils utilities...

A set of printk clean-ups were sent in today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. These clean-ups are important as they are a stepping stone towards the threaded / atomic console printing and in turn that is the last major blocker before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can finally be upstreamed in the kernel...

Fwupd 1.9.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for enabling system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). With the Fwupd 1.9.5 some additional devices are now supported plus there are some other core improvements...

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices...

As part of the "smp/core" changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel, partial SMT enablement landed for processors that support more than two threads per physical core to allow greater run-time control over just how many threads to enable...

OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels...

With the EXT4 file-system updates for Linux 6.6 there is mostly some code clean-ups and other bug fixing. But one change in particular stands out for its performance impact...

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel...

Among the many changes to land during this first week of the Linux 6.6 cycle were the x86 CPU microcode loader updates that now unconditionally makes that support part of the x86/x86_64 kernel builds...

Going along with AMD's work on AMD openSIL for open-sourcing the CPU silicon initialization code to ultimately replace AGESA in future hardware platforms, the initial EPYC "Genoa" code for Coreboot has been upstreamed along with the Onyx motherboard target...

The Bcachefs file-system code born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code was submitted for Linux 6.5 but ultimately rejected. Bcachefs is now trying again to land for the current Linux 6.6 merge window...

Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward...

The EROFS read-only file-system and F2FS Flash Friendly File-System were among the FS updates to land this week for Linux 6.6 -- in addition to marking ReiserFS as obsolete...

Sriram Ramkrishna at Intel, who serves as the community manager and developer relations for oneAPI, held a virtual oneAPI meetup this week with Red Hat's David Airlie. Airlie should not need any introduction for longtime Phoronix readers given his longtime contributions to the Linux kernel graphics drivers, Mesa, and related open-source graphics work at Red Hat. Airlie shared some interesting remarks around the current Linux GPU compute stacks from the different vendors and associated challenges...

The perf event changes were submitted this week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window with changes this cycle for Intel, AMD, and Arm...

There wasn't any big Vulkan spec update for SIGGRAPH this year but the frequent point releases continue rolling on for this high performance graphics and compute API...

The tmpfs file-system that keeps all of its data within virtual memory has gained a few new features with Linux 6.6, including the long-awaited quota support to better protect against malicious users that could try to consume all of your system RAM...

While leading up to a US holiday weekend, KDE developers haven't let up in their development activities around Plasma 6.0 and associated application work. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary to outline all of the interesting changes for the week...

In July the Steam Survey results pointed to a half percent jump in the Linux gaming marketshare, taking it to nearly 2% thanks to the success of Valve's Steam Deck that runs their Arch Linux powered SteamOS platform. After the big boost in July you are probably wondering what happened in August... Well, a few minutes ago the new Steam Survey monthly results were published...

For those with extra time over the US Labor Day holiday weekend, Linux From Scratch 12 has been published for those wishing to hand-roll their own Linux system build from source. Linux From Scratch 12.0 is accompanied by the Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 12.0 release too, including the systemd variant, for further extending LFS installations with more packages...

Following the recent Wine summer holiday, Wine 8.15 is out today and back on track with the usual two-week release regiment...

Palmer Dabbelt sent out the initial batch of RISC-V processor architecture updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel port...

The DeviceTree changes for Linux 6.6 add the ability to generate DeviceTree (DT) nodes for PCI devices. AMD spearheaded this effort for applying DeviceTree overlays to PCI devices containing non-discoverable downstream devices...

The media subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.6 kernel and most notably is introducing the Intel IVSC MEI drivers as well as extending the Intel IPU bridge logic to work with these new drivers...

OpenColorIO (OCIO) as the open-source color management solution for motion picture production and maintained by the Academy Software Foundation is out with a new feature release that will be part of their 2024 VFX Reference Platform. Notable with this release are new SIMD optimizations with AVX/AVX2 and Arm NEON...

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...