Phoronix

The X.Org Server and XWayland have new releases out ahead of the holidays, but it's not for Christmas feature releases and instead for fixing a number of new security issues...

As a nice Christmas present, code merged today to the Linux 6.2 kernel speeds up a core kernel function by a factor of 715x...

The Linux 6.2 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) open-source kernel graphics/display driver changes have been merged with a few notable feature additions for users this cycle...

Released on Sunday was Linux 6.1 and in addition to having many new features making it all the more exciting is that it's expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel release. As such it will see widespread adoption particularly among servers and much interest from the hyperscalers. For those weighing an upgrade from last year's Linux 5.15 LTS kernel, Linux 6.1 with initial testing on an AMD EPYC Milan-X 2P server has shown a nice speed bump is possible across a wide-range of workloads.

The x86 memory management updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window have been submitted with two primary additions: addressing another "tasty target for attackers" and separately is also landing of Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality...

As outlined yesterday the Radeon RX 7900 series can work on the upstream, open-source Linux driver stack if using Linux 6.0+ and Mesa 22.2 (but ideally 22.3+). But if you aren't wanting to jump to a newer kernel version and are running one of the supported enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD released their Radeon Software for Linux 22.40 driver package with Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA3" series support...

Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13...

Back in 2020 the Linux kernel added a split-lock detector since when they occur an atomic instruction spanning multiple cache lines and requiring a global bus lock is needed. This has an unfortunate heavy impact on the system and thus the detector was added to report it to the kernel log when a split-lock occurs. But earlier this year starting with Linux 5.19, kernel developers decided to "make life miserable" and intentionally slow down bad behaving apps that abuse split-locks. That in turn has caused problems for some games -- so far select Windows games running under Steam Play -- and thus a new kernel knob is being added to more easily adjust the behavior...

All of the Arm SoC support additions and DeviceTree updates have been merged for the Linux 6.2 merge window. There is support for a number of additional Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in the kernel as well as having the initial mainline bits for the Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max SoC variants...

Budgie desktop lead developer (and former Solus Linux developer) Joshua Strobl has proposed a Fedora Budgie desktop spin for Fedora 38...

What first entered the kernel as the "Software Defined Silicon" and now set to be marketed as Intel On Demand is ready to go with Linux 6.2 for this CPU license activation model appearing with upcoming Intel Xeon server processors...

The Intel TDX guest support has been merged into the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel...

The Btrfs and EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window have been submitted. The Btrfs changes are rather notable with continued performance enhancements as well as making some reliability improvements to its native RAID5/RAID6 modes...

After being in various forms of discussion since 2017, IOMMUFD has been submitted for the Linux 6.2 kernel as it lays the groundwork for aiming to overhaul IOMMU handling by QEMU and virtual machines on Linux...

While now in the code freeze for Wine 8.0 as the next annual stable release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, one of the features that didn't make it is the long in-development Wayland driver. Thankfully though the Wayland driver continues to mature and it looks like early next year following Wine 8.0 it might finally be upstreamed...

Firefox 108 is now available for download as the last major Firefox web browser release of 2022...

For those that were holding out hope that the AMD P-State Linux driver's EPP functionality for more power/performance control under Linux would be ready for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window, it's been rejected for the cycle and will be held off until at least the Linux 6.3 cycle begins in February...

The Raspberry Pi team has a positive supply chain update with some good news ahead of Christmas and when they expect to reach pre-pandemic supply chain levels...

As part of the many pull requests being sent in early for the Linux 6.2 merge window to avoid crunch time around the holidays is the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework updates...

The OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew that traces its roots back to the days of Mandrake Linux is out with a "platinum" release candidate of their upcoming OpenMandriva ROME 22.12 release, which is their rolling release flavor...

Set to be merged in the Linux 6.2 is a new driver for the ChromeOS Human Presence Sensor "HPS" used for detecting when one or more humans are in front of the Chromebook...

Following the release last night of the Linux 6.1 kernel by Linus Torvalds, the GNU crew has released their GNU Linux-libre 6.1 kernel that is derived from those sources while continuing to strip out code dependent upon non-free firmware/microcode and blocking the ability to load proprietary kernel modules...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1 as stable!..

Intel on Sunday posted a set of Linux patches implementing SPEC CTRL virtualization support for this VMX feature with new Intel CPUs to help with migrating virtual machines to hosts with different CPU microarchitectures where their security mitigations may be different...

While Linux 6.1 merged the initial Rust infrastructure, in this kernel version set to be released as stable today there isn't any Rust-based functionality for end-users. With v6.1 it's just some of the initial code for building up the Rust programming language support and it's continuing that way for Linux 6.2. The pull request of more Rust enablement has already been sent out for the Linux 6.2 merge window...

While the Linux 6.1 stable kernel isn't even being released until later today, there already have been a number of feature pull requests submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle. Due to the merge window being the two weeks leading up to Christmas, those with generous holiday/vacation time have been sending in their pull requests in advance. One of those early pull requests is all of the sound subsystem updates...

As expected, the Linux 6.2 kernel is introducing a lot more Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement code...

Back in October was the surprising move of Google deprecating JPEG-XL support in their Chrome/Chromium web browser. Google engineers argued there wasn't enough interesti n JPEG-XL and not sufficient enough benefits over existing formats. Their plan was to remove the JPEG-XL support in Chrome 110 and indeed that has now happened...

For those thinking about what open-source non-linear video editor to try out this holiday season for any videos, OpenShot 3.0 was officially released today as a big step forward for that project...

The Meson build system continues enjoying terrific developer adoption and that's even prior to declaring a "1.0" version. However, that's about to change with Meson 1.0-rc1 having now been issued for testing...

Following the recent developer talk of looking to drop SLOB from the Linux kernel, this simple allocator is being deprecated come Linux 6.2...

Today marks the release of KDE Frameworks 5.101, which is notable in that this is the point that feature development on KDE Frameworks 5 is now effectively over. The focus now turns to KDE Frameworks 6...

The long-awaited Godot 4 open-source game engine release is getting closer... The developers have already begun drafting plans past Godot 4.0 and they have now moved to weekly development snapshots as this much anticipated release nears...

The belated Mesa 22.2.5 is now available as the last planned point release to the Mesa 22.2 series...

KDE developers remain quite busy as we approach the holiday season. KDE's Spectacle screenshot utility has seen some new work and there were various other fixes and improvements to be merged this week...

As planned the first release candidate of Wine 8.0 is now available that marks the culmination of the Wine 7.xx bi-weekly development releases and now onto the strictly bug-fixing phase before introducing Wine 8.0 as stable in early 2023...

The Qt6 toolkit introduced the notion of platform-specific objects via the QNativeInterface namespace and now set to come with Qt 6.5 is support for a Wayland native interface for application developers wanting to interact directly with Wayland object handles...

Recently there have been a number of Phoronix readers writing in about CachyOS, an Arch Linux based distribution that is new and is focused on " better speed, security and ease of use," So of course there has been requests to see how well CachyOS performs against other distributions... In thus article is an initial look at the CachyOS performance compared to that of also Arch Linux based Endeavour OS, Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora Workstation 37, and then Intel's Clear Linux that is already well known for its performance attributes.

PipeWire 0.3.62 is out today as the newest feature and bug-fixing update to this open-source project that has begun conquering the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams...

NVIDIA has released CUDA 12.0 as the latest major feature update to their proprietary compute API...

Ahead of next week's Radeon RX 7900 series hitting retail availability, AMD today issued a new AMDVLK driver update as their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

While Linux 6.1 is introducing many new features, for the Linux 6.2 merge window beginning next week there is a lot more on tap. Linux 6.2 has a lot of exciting additions expected from new low-level software features, continuing to lay more Rust code, new hardware support, stable Intel Arc Graphics support, and a ton more. Here is an early look at some of what is expected...

AMD engineers on Thursday released AOMP 16.0-3 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on providing the latest patches for enjoying AMD Instinct / Radeon OpenMP offloading as part of their ROCm compute stack...

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221203, a new version of its in-house Linux distribution fulfilling a variety of internal needs...

Hot off the release of Blender 3.4, Blender developers have begun discussing the possibility of raising their CPU requirements moving forward for making use of this open-source 3D modeling software...

One of the new Linux 6.1 features was set to be enabling HID++ support for all Logitech Bluetooth devices by default rather than the current enabling it on a per-device basis. But this change turned out to be too opportunistic and now days ahead of the Linux 6.1 stable debut has been reverted...

Going back to the summer Intel posted their initial open-source Linux driver for their Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" debuting with Meteor Lake. Since then they have continued refining this open-source VPU Linux driver and with the latest patch series have adapted it to make use of the new accelerator framework/subsystem premiering in Linux 6.2...

Ahead of the holidays there is a new Vulkan API spec update from The Khronos Group...

At the start of November AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 series while these high-end RDNA3 graphics cards will go on sale next week. Both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are at Phoronix for Linux testing with AMD's fully open-source graphics driver stack while today the embargo expires on showing off the hardware.

PHP 8.2 is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language primarily for web purposes...