Phoronix

The Godot engine developers are starting off March with a bang... The much anticipated Godot 4.0 engine that has been in development for years has been released as stable!..

An updated scheduler model for Intel Alder Lake P processors has been merged into the LLVM compiler after finding some differences compared to Intel's documentation/guidance...

In addition to the in-development Apple M1/M2 DRM kernel graphics/display driver being written in Rust, there is now a second graphics-related kernel driver seeing early work in Rust. The existing VGEM driver is being rewritten in the Rust programming language...

Microsoft engineers continue to work heavily on enhancing the Linux support for Hyper-V considering that in the Azure public cloud at last report was more than 50% of their VMs running Linux. Microsoft has continued implementing more Hyper-V features within the Linux kernel and their latest is working on Virtual Trust Level (VTL) integration as part of Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) handling...

A few months back the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver added TearFree page-flipping support. The option eliminates screen tearing without the use of a compositor and was seen as a win by many for this generic DDX driver that works atop the modern DRM/KMS kernel drivers. But a rather annoying issue was discovered that could lead to audio/video synchronization problems was uncovered and is now fixed in the latest driver code...

Loongson engineers continue working to improve their MIPS64-derived, RISC-V-inspired LoongArch CPU architecture code. With the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel are yet more improvements, including now supporting Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for better security...

The BFQ I/O scheduler has long been suited well for MMC/SD card storage devices with a single queue now finally with Linux 6.3 the Kconfig setup will suggest/imply that I/O scheduler to help ensure it gets built...

While a short month there still were 243 original news articles on Phoronix written by your's truly about various open-source and Linux topics. There were also nine additional Linux hardware reviews looking at the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, the long-awaited NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance results, and more. Here is a look back at what excited open-source/Linux enthusiasts in February...

With the Fedora Linux change completion deadline passed, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has been eyeing up their approved list to see what didn't make the cut for Fedora 38 that is due out in April...

After publishing their initial Quantum software development kit beta last year, Intel today released the Quantum SDK 1.0 version to help grow the developer ecosystem for quantum computing...

NVIDIA today released their first beta driver in the R530 driver series for Linux users...

While in recent days there has been much talk around the new, experimental and currently out-of-tree SSDFS file-system for NVMe ZNS drives, when it comes to a modern flash-optimized Linux file-system today, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues handling that space well and has been battle-tested via deployment on Android devices and more. With Linux 6.3, F2FS continues to be refined with more fixes and other minor enhancements...

The HP Dev One Linux laptop is now sold-out and the production on it has ended. The HP Dev One that launched last year was the very interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for coming out with a Linux laptop catering to developers and running Pop!_OS...

With the EXT4 file-system being quite mature at this stage, with many kernel cycles these days this widely-used file-system just sees bug fixes and other minor work. But for the newly-opened Linux 6.3 cycle, EXT4 is seeing a nice performance boost under certain conditions with direct I/O...

As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release...

Making its debut today as their latest open-source project receiving optimizations for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Intel has rolled out ISPC 1.19 as their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler...

As of today the KDE Plasma development branch is now made Qt6-only as development work on Plasma 6.0 heats up...

While GIMP 3.0 will hopefully release this year after years of waiting, for those using the current GIMP 2.10 stable series the v2.10.34 release is now available to round out the day...

Ahead of tomorrow's launch of the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D processors, today marks the embargo expiry on the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache processor. Today I can share with you the initial performance around the performance of this $699 USD processor that features a 144MB cache.

LibreOffice 7.5 released earlier this month as just the latest six-month update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite while today the Apache Software Foundation released OpenOffice 4.1.14. While the prior release, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13, happened all the way back in July, there isn't much to show for today's update...

Armbian as the Ubuntu and Debian based Linux distribution that is optimized for single board computers primarily in the ARM/AArch64 and RISC-V space is out with its first major update of 2023...

The Vulkan 1.3.242 spec is now available with a handful of clarifications and fixes to the existing text as well as introducing the new VK_NV_low_latency extension...

The Linux kernel since last year has mistakenly left systems relying on the original Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for Spectre V2 mitigation without Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP) coverage for cross-HyperThread dealing with this Spectre vulnerability. There is a patch underway that is resolving this issue for Intel Skylake era systems...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is seeing work towards being able to support Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.2 with VKD3D-Proton to further enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on Linux...

A change made to the Linux kernel back in 2016 is causing issues with NVMe PCIe support on some ARM64 devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro X and Lenovo ThinkPad X13s. A new kernel quirk is on the way for aiming to address that and yield working NVMe storage...

Merged this past week into Mesa 23.1 is initial support for Loongson's LoongArch CPU architecture...

While two years ago in Linux 5.16 multi-actuator hard drive support was merged, with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel the BFQ I/O scheduler is now seeing some tuning for multi-actuator drives...

The hardware monitoring support among consumer desktop motherboards continues to improve with Linux 6.3 adding sensor support for many ASUS B650/B660/X670 AMD Ryzen motherboards...

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust...

Cloud Hypervisor as a reminder is what started out as an open-source Intel project to develop a modern hypervisor focused on cloud workloads and with security being among the leading concerns. Cloud Hypervisor more recently is developed as a Linux Foundation project but with Intel's software engineers being among the leading contributors to the project along with the likes of Arm, Tencent, Bytedance, and Microsoft...

The cryptography subsystem updates for the Linux 6.3 merge window landed earlier this week with a few notable additions this cycle...

FreeBSD 13.2 Beta 3 is now available in providing the latest test release for this forthcoming update to the FreeBSD 13 stable series...

The RISC-V architecture updates were merged this Saturday for the Linux 6.3 merge window...

Sent out for review on Friday evening were 76 patches implementing SSDFS, the newest open-source Linux file-system and catering to flash-friendly drives and particularly those with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) support...

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds...

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors...

While last week brought the Plasma 5.27 release as the last feature update to the Plasma 5 series, KDE developers haven't letup in their development efforts with this week continuing to be quite busy for the developers from bug fixing to new features...

Along with all of the Arm SoC and board updates that were merged to the mainline Linux 6.3 kernel earlier in the week, the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have also landed for this next Linux kernel version...

The MFD subsystem changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.3 kernel that include a new driver for the Intel Platform Management Component Interface (PMCI) for use by the BMC controllers on the Intel Max 10 series FPGAs...

As written about last year, the Laminar Research developers responsible for the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software have been working to make use of Mesa's Zink for leveraging OpenGL atop Vulkan to thereby avoid vendor OpenGL drivers that can vary in quality across platforms. With X-Plane 12.04b3, that goal is finally realized...

Introduced to the mainline kernel two years ago with Linux 5.12 was the IDMAPPED mounts functionality that is useful from systemd-homed to containers and other use-cases. Since then more Linux file-systems and software has added support for IDMAPPED mounts and it's being furthered along now with Linux 6.3...

The merge request for landing the first of "many" parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland...

It's not too often I get to talk about major FreeBSD graphics driver improvements, but with the latest X.Org Server Git code paired with the recent NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver there is now support for PRIME render offload should you be using a multi-GPU setup on this BSD...

Adding to all of the other AMD changes coming with Linux 6.3 is now also having the AMD-Xilinx XDMA driver in tow. Getting this XDMA subsystem driver upstreamed is important for unblocking more Xilinx-based feature code to be merged into the Linux kernel...

Back in 2020 Google and the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) came up with a "Criticality Score" to rank the importance/criticality of open-source projects. The Criticality Score is a means of quantifying the importance of an open-source project such as if in need of funding or development assistance. Criticality Score 2.0 has now been published...

The 8BitDo Pro 2 Wired Controller as a popular ~$35 USD gaming controller will see proper support with the Linux 6.3 kernel...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner has been public now for about two years. CBL-Mariner has been in use for Microsoft's use-cases from their Azure cloud to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) while their newest release continues a recent trend of pointing towards a high performance computing (HPC) workloads focus too...

Merged on Thursday to Mesa 23.1 was implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles using hashed stages with support for caching and replay. What makes this work notable is that it in turn allows the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 running with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton on Linux to begin enjoying ray-tracing support...

The Linux 6.3 scheduler changes were merged earlier this week that overall provide a collection of minor improvements to this important area of the kernel...

For many years now there has been delta RPM support built into Fedora to allow just downloading the binary difference between the currently installed RPM package and the updated version. While this made sense during the days of limited Internet connectivity/bandwidth, delta RPMs haven't proven useful in years and now Fedora Linux is considering removing this support...