Phoronix

For Linux gamers running the lightweight Openbox X11 window manager, the newest Steam beta update brings a new option to fix problems with Steam's dropdown menus being unclickable...

It's now more clear why last week Linus Torvalds personally took to improving the Linux kernel's user-mode stack expansion code: it's necessary to address a now disclosed security vulnerability dubbed StackRot...

Tow-Boot has been a "user-friendly" distribution of U-Boot that was seeing regular updates but for nearly one year has been on hiatus without any new releases. That changed overnight with Tow-Boot 2022.07-006 being released and a call for new developers...

CodeWeavers developer Zebediah Figura opened up the initial merge request yesterday that is the first step of a multi-part effort for reorganizing and cleaning up the Wine Direct3D "WineD3D" code...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is tacking on a few new features for the Linux 6.5 kernel...

It's already time for the first alpha release of the in-development GNOME 45 desktop...

With the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that began shipping last month I've so far looked at the Linux support for this device as well as looking at the Windows 11 vs. Linux gaming performance as well as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU performance. What many Phoronix readers have been most interested in seeing though are the side-by-side benchmarks for Valve's Steam Deck up against the ASUS ROG Ally. Today's benchmarks provide just that comparison plus some CPU benchmarks too.

There's been a lot of AMD-Xilinx code going upstream in the Linux kernel over the past few months to benefit AMD's embedded efforts from the QDMA driver to CDX bus to XDMA and more. The latest hitting the kernel is an AMD-Xilinx Versal watchdog driver...

As I've written about a few times in recent months, AMD has been enhancing GPU support for use under Xen virtualization. Their interests in Xen weren't clear to this point given that KVM virtualization tends to be the dominant solution these days when it comes to open-source Linux virtualization. Now it's been revealed that the AMD GPU interests in Xen stem from an in-vehicle infotainment play...

UDisks 2.10 was released last week for this set abstraction layer providing a daemon and tooling around the manipulation of disks and storage devices under Linux...

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming...

In addition to Lunar Lake sound driver support in Linux 6.5 and the recent SOF update for Sound Open Firmware for Lunar Lake, Linux 6.5 is also bringing initial SoundWire Intel ACE2.x support that is part of the Lunar Lake audio capabilities...

Released yesterday was a new version of UPower, the FreeDesktop.org software known long ago as DeviceKit-Power and used as an abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux and other platforms. The new UPower 1.90.1 release is the first update to this software in just shy of one year...

LXD as the open-source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) has long been closely associated with Canonical due to its founding and pushed along by the Ubuntu maker as one of their software offerings. However, it has to this point been part of the Linux Containers project except moving forward Canonical has decided to pull it more into their direct control...

Here comes a very exciting addition to the Linux 6.5 kernel: the initial infrastructure has landed for scope-based resource management...

While it's likely been years since most of you touched any Firewire devices, for those still having any old DV cameras around or professional audio hardware with an IEEE-1394 interface, Linux 6.5 is bringing improvements to its Firewire subsystem that until recently has been rather dormant for years...

Mozilla Firefox 115.0 official builds are now available for this notable update to this open-source web browser while also marking the new Extended Support Release (ESR) series...

The GNU Compiler Collection 14 (GCC 14) will feature support for the new RISC-V processor ISA vector cryptographic extensions...

Tejun Heo last week submitted the workqueue changes for the Linux 6.5 kernel and they include an interesting addition...

The libjpeg-turbo 3.0 open-source release occurred today for this open-source JPEG image codec implementation focused on SIMD instruction usage for optimized efficiency. While libjpeg-turbo has been a great open-source development success and has seen widespread use, its feature development moving forward may be limited due to funding gaps...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were submitted today that are ready for introduction in the Linux 6.5 kernel...

GNU Binutils 2.41 was branched today in its Git repository in preparations for releasing this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and other platforms...

Last year the USB4 v2.0 specification was published as the next iteration of the USB4 standard. USB4 v2 supports 80 Gbps transfer rates with USB Type-C active cables and the ability to handle up to 120 Gbps in one direction and 40 Gbps for the other direction. Intel is contributing initial support for USB4 v2 to the Linux 6.5 kernel along with initial enablement on their new Intel Barlow Ridge discrete controller...

After being in development for more than one year, Perl 5.38 released today as the latest feature update to this programming language...

Jonas Adahl of Red Hat today published a new version of the Wayland-Protocols package that consists of all the stable and staging protocol definitions for use in the Wayland world...

The Virtual Function I/O "VFIO" changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.5 kernel merge window. This IOMMU/device agnostic framework has added an AMD CDX driver this cycle along with other improvements for this subsystem that is important to the Linux virtualization stack...

The in-development GCC 14 compiler has added support for the MIPS16e2 processor ISA...

Besides being curious about the Steam Survey results for indicating the size of the Linux gaming marketshare as an overall percentage, one of the interesting metrics we are curious about each month is the AMD vs. Intel CPU marketshare for Linux gaming. AMD has been on quite an upward trajectory among Linux gamers/enthusiasts in recent years not only for their Radeon graphics cards with their popular open-source driver stack but their Ryzen CPUs have become extremely popular with Linux users. With the new Steam Survey results for June, AMD CPUs are found on nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems polled by Steam...

This past week at the Linux Foundation's Embedded Open-Source Summit in Prague, Sony engineer Tim Bird who is prominent in the embedded Linux community provided another insightful presentation to sum up the current state of the embedded Linux ecosystem...

In a move similar to GCC's implementation, LLVM Git landed this week initial support for fat LTO objects. This "-ffat-lto-objects" support will be found with the LLVM/Clang 17 release this autumn...

Valve has shared their Steam Survey results for the month of June which shows the Steam on Linux marketshare holding steady...

The visually-stunning Unigine Engine that these days is most commonly used in commercial simulation applications recently published Unigine 2.17 where they have finally made their Vulkan and Direct3D 12 renderers production-ready...

The IBM PowerPC feature updates were merged on Friday to the Linux 6.5 kernel...

This week NVIDIA and their AIB partners began shipping the GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card with pricing starting out at $299 USD. Like the recently-launched Radeon RX 7600, the RTX 4060 is geared mostly for 1080p gaming but how does it compare against the RX 7600 that is priced starting at $249? Here are some initial Linux gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 against the Radeon RX 7600.

An independent developer has posted an open-source Linux driver for review in order to handle the Apple Studio Display backlight control under Linux. The Apple Studio Display uses a Thunderbolt (DP) interface for display but lacks any hardware controls. Thus a USB interface is used by the monitor for controlling attributes like the display backlight brightness...

Lavapipe as the software-based Vulkan implementation within Mesa has now landed support for Vulkan descriptor extensions and in turn this CPU-based Vulkan implementation can begin running some Direct3D 12 games with VKD3D-Proton. Keep in mind, however, the performance is severely limited...

Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons. Using Linux though and other open-source software would ease development, open more developers to being able to work on said avionics platforms, have much better documentation, and lower other barriers, but there are challenges currently involved...

Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn't write as much actual kernel code these days as he used to. These days he's often busy overseeing the upstream kernel development community with reviewing code, managing releases, and chiming in on mailing list discussions. Once in a while though he gets down and dirty with some low-level kernel hacking just as he's done now for Linux 6.5 with improving the user-mode stack expansion code...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement in the Linux kernel remains ongoing and with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel are yet more features now being enabled for this exciting industry standard...

KDE developers finished out June on a high note with many features and new fixes landing for Plasma 6.0 development as well as refinements for later Plasma 5.27 point releases...

With the first-half of the year amazingly already in the books, here is a look back at what's captivated Linux/open-source fans the most from all the content on Phoronix. So far this year I have personally written 1,407 original news articles on software/hardware topics and another 74 original Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles...

While OpenZFS 3.0 has been talked about for a few years with macOS support, it doesn't appear to be on the immediate horizon and the OpenZFS 2.2 release is being worked on currently for providing a few new features to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Following the path of SLOB, Linux's SLAB memory allocator is now officially deprecated beginning with the Linux 6.5 kernel series...

The Linux 6.5 networking subsystem changes include more preparations around the ongoing WiFi 7 wireless standard as well as bringing up support for a number of newer network adapters...

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 was released on Thursday for this Intel-started open-source software project for having a fully open audio DSP firmware stack and related development tooling. While initially limited to Intel hardware support, SOF has since grown and seen support from the likes of Mediatek, Realtek, NXP, and even recent AMD SoCs...

China's Loongson continues preparing the software support for their upcoming 3A6000 processors that will feature several new capabilities over their inaugural LoongArch-based 3A5000 series...

Cloud Hypervisor has advanced quite nicely in the half-year it's been around since Intel software engineers began writing this Rust-based cloud-focused virtualization hypervisor. This VMM project has since become more independent and regularly receiving code contributions from the likes of Arm, Microsoft, and Tencent while also gaining the support of companies like AMD and Ampere. On Thursday marked the release of Cloud Hypervisor 33...

The PCI subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.5 development...

Following Red Hat's decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering...

The Arm (and RISC-V) SoC updates have been submitted for merging to the Linux 6.5 kernel. Additions this cycle include an exciting RISC-V processor now supported, NVIDIA Tegra234 "Orin" upstream additions, and other new SoCs and devices/boards being upstreamed...