Phoronix

Merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel were all of the VirtIO and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (VDPA) changes. Interesting from that pull request is delivering a big performance bump for VDUSE...

In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code...

During this month on Phoronix were 242 news articles on Phoronix with original content each and every day presented by your's truly around open-source and Linux. April was interesting with the release of Linux 6.3, all of the exciting Linux 6.4 features merged so far, AMD introducing openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization with support for Coreboot and similar firmware solutions, Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04 being released, and much more...

It sure doesn't feel like it's already been five years since Huawei announced EROFS as a read-only file-system initially designed for Android devices but has proven useful in the mainline Linux kernel to Linux users at large with interesting use-cases also coming up around containers and more. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel are yet more improvements to this read-only file-system...

Back in 2021 AMD began preparing Linux kernel support for 5-level paging support with their future processors and building off the prior 5-level page table kernel support established by Intel. That was followed by AMD enabling 5-level page table support with KVM SVM in the Linux 5.15 kernel. AMD CPUs with 5-level page table support since launched in the form of 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors. One piece only now coming together though is AMD IOMMU driver support for 5-level guest page table support...

While prominent gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer still is not officially supporting Linux with their vast array of products, thanks to the community-driven OpenRazer project there is unofficial open-source support and can work quite well when paired with the likes of Polychromatic as a nice user interface. Out today is OpenRazer 3.6 in enabling the latest Razer products on Linux...

With the work led by Intel engineers on bringing up the Compute Express Link specification features into the open-source kernel, Linux 6.4 is another cycle seeing a lot of enablement work on the CXL front...

The HID subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.4 kernel that is now half-way through its merge window...

With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software...

On Friday the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted a pull request of new Rust feature code for the Linux 6.4 kernel...

Since 2020 Intel engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a feature similar to Arm's Top Byte Ignore (TBI) for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. This can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. The Intel LAM kernel support has finally been merged with Linux 6.4...

In preparing for releasing Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" in June, out this weekend is the second release candidate of the Debian Installer for this next major Debian Linux release...

KDE developers this month have been tackling many open bugs as well as seeing the early Plasma 6 development state rough yet usable. In ending out April, they continued their "bug slaughterfest" in whittling away at their open bug count...

Wine 8.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software to enjoy running Windows games and applications across Linux / BSDs / macOS / Chrome OS platforms...

As noted back in March, the plan with Linux 6.4 is to start removing old, unused and unmaintained PCMCIA drivers. As part of that process to begin dropping old PCMCIA/CardBus driver code from the kernel, all of the PCMCIA "char" drivers were on the chopping block. Linus Torvalds pulled in the char/misc changes this week for Linux 6.4 and indeed those drivers are now removed. Meanwhile this pull introduced the new AMD CDX subsystem...

After the patches had been in development for well more than a year, sent out today for the Linux 6.4 merge window are the NFS server (NFSD) changes that include supporting RPC-with-TLS...

After being in development for two years, a new beta release of Zlib-ng as the "next generation" data compression library is available with much faster data decompression...

Matrox announced on Thursday their new graphics card series LUMA... The Matrox LUMA isn't powered by their own GPU design but rather they are now tapping Intel for their Arc Graphics discrete GPUs...

All of the scheduler changes were sent out on Thursday that are ready for the Linux 6.4 kernel...

Intel's open-source engineers maintaining the SVT-AV1 software package as a high performance, cross-platform AV1 video encoder have issued a sizable update...

The NTFS3 driver developed by Paragon Software that provides read/write support and other modern features for the NTFS file-system with the mainline kernel has seen a new round of changes for Linux 6.4...

Valve is working toward the end of April on a high note as they issued a "significant" update to the Steam client beta...

The Debian release team has just announced a tentative ship date for Debian 12.0 "Bookworm"...

AMD has contributed support to Mesa's VA-API Gallium3D state tracker for supporting AV1 video encoding...

While AMD has yet to launch the Radeon RX 7600 or RX 7600 series graphics cards (sans the RX 7700S), AMD's GPUOpen tooling has seen new releases today in preparation for those forthcoming RDNA3 GPUs...

After profiling and raising an issue by Google's Chrome OS engineers, there is a set of "request for comments" patches out today for the Intel Linux graphics driver that can provide 10~15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode...

Introduced one month ago in Vulkan 1.3.246 was the new VK_EXT_shader_object extension that was worked on by developers from Activision to Valve. Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been busy the past few weeks on getting this shader object support wired up for use by this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

It's likely been years since many of you have heard of Firewire and some readers likely never had the opportunity to use it. The Firewire interface was great back in the day and during the early period of digital video cameras, but modern versions of USB and Thunderbolt are far faster, allow longer cable distances, and numerous other advantages. While Firewire hasn't seen much activity in years and can be outpaced by USB 3.0 and beyond, there is a new Firewire subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel and he intends to keep at it for the next six years...

Vulkan 1.3.249 is out today as the latest spec update for this industry-standard high performance graphics and compute API. Notable with Vulkan 1.3.249 is the introduction of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch...

For those making use of the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for supporting the Radeon HD 2000 series through the HD 6000 series (pre-GCN) graphics cards, Mesa 23.2 is finally ready to drop its TGSI code path for what was once the default intermediate representation (IR) used by Gallium3D drivers but in more recent years NIR has become the preferred IR format...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer and SUSE engineer Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 kernel merge window...

Dragora remains one of the few Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and is a from-scratch distribution focused on providing only free software... The last stable release of the Linux distribution was Dragora 2.2 back in 2012 while out today is Dragora 3.0 Beta 2, which itself is coming three and a half years since the prior beta...

The x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window have landed. This includes numerous x86 laptop driver benefits as well as other new features for the platform-drivers-x86 subsystem...

It's been one month already since the debut of GNOME 44 and out today is the first point release...

When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been pulled into the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel with ASUS Intel/AMD desktop motherboards being the big winners with these driver updates...

There's a bit of Linux kernel code for AMD Zen 2 processors called the "spectral chicken" and a call for cleaning up that code, which was originally written by an Intel Linux engineer, has been rejected...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) device driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.4 merge window...

GCC 13.1 has been released as the first stable version of GCC 13 as this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The xf86-video-ati 22.0 driver has been released as a rare update to this X.Org DDX driver used by older pre-GCN ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards...

In addition to EXT4 seeing some performance optimizations and folio conversion for Linux 6.4, the Btrfs and Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) drivers are also seeing some nice enhancements with this next Linux kernel version...

Last year the Pop!_OS software developers at System76 introduced system76-scheduler as a Rust-written user-space daemon intended to auto-configure CFS and dynamically manage process priorities. They've added various features to improve the Linux desktop responsiveness and performance while today they rolled out system76-scheduler v2.0 as the latest iteration of this process scheduler...

The latest feature planning around Fedora 39 for releasing later this year is around ensuring your EFI System Partition (ESP) is large enough for new functionality moving forward...

Git 2.40.1 is out today due to three new security vulnerabilities being disclosed. Due to those security fixes there are also Git updates for prior stable series with v2.39.3, v2.38.5, v2.37.7, v2.36.6, v2.35.8, v2.34.8, v2.33.8, v2.32.7, v2.31.8, and v2.30.9...

While Intel Shadow Stack support has been around since Tiger Lake CPUs as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), finally for the Linux 6.4 kernel is this security feature being enabled with the mainline Linux kernel...

VA-API has been around for more than one decade as the most common Linux Video Acceleration API that works across multiple GPU/driver vendors. It's been Linux-focused to this point while thanks to the work of Microsoft has begun seeing support on Windows...

The newest feature added by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst to the Rusticl Mesa OpenCL open-source driver is FP64 support...

While often times the EXT4 file-system driver updates for new Linux kernel merge windows can be rather mundane given the maturity of this widely-used Linux file-system, this time around for Linux 6.4 it's a bit more exciting...

For those making use of Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization there are some notable additions to find with the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel...