Phoronix

Last year the OpenPOWER Foundation announced LibreBMC as a POWER-based open-source BMC and now they have progressed to the point of actually demoing this BMC backed by a fully open-source software stack...

Coreboot 4.18 had been planned for release in August but after that slipped, this newest Coreboot feature release is now shipping and comes with many hardware support improvements and other changes for this open-source system firmware implementation...

Back in August I wrote about a patch to change AMD's CPU microcode loading on Linux to now patch every logical CPU thread rather than just per physical core. It turned out that at least some CPU microcode updates do make per-thread modifications while the Linux kernel microcode handling for AMD was just applying microcode updates at run-time on a per-core basis. That patch was seemingly forgotten about but has now been queued up as part of x86 "urgent" changes for the mainline kernel...

Microsoft has released its monthly update to CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution serving a variety of purposes from WSL to Azure...

Two weeks ago a bunch of old Mesa code got removed including the XvMC front-end, Rbug as a remote debugging interface, and some of Graw that was to serve as a raw Gallium3D interface without a traditional Gallium front-end. Some of Graw was accidentally left in the source tree while now that has been caught and eliminated in further lightening the size of Mesa...

Valve is preparing to roll-out Proton 7.0-5 as the newest version of this Wine-derived software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. For facilitating some testing prior to the formal Proton 7.0-5, a release candidate was published today...

Libcamera has been in development for several years now as an open-source camera support library that works across Linux, Android, and Chrome OS platforms. Due to interest from seeing tagged releases, the libcamera crew has published their first official release of this open-source camera stack...

Ahead of O3DCON kicking off tomorrow in Austin, Texas as a developer event around the Open 3D Engine game engine backed by the Linux Foundation and numerous organizations, O3DE 22.10 has been released...

VESA today announced the publishing of the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. As a pleasant change, VESA has been working behind the scenes to see that all DisplayPort 2.0 certified products are actually forward-compatible with this more strict DisplayPort 2.1 specification...

Now that Linux 6.1-rc1 was released, here is my look at all of the interesting kernel changes and new features that landed over the past two weeks. Linux 6.1 is shaping up to be another exciting kernel with many new software features, new hardware enablement work, and other changes for this end-of-year 2022 kernel version that is also likely to be the next Linux LTS release.

Firefox 106.0 web browser release builds are now available ahead of the official Firefox 106 announcement on Tuesday. Firefox 106 does have improvements to its PDF viewer as well as the WebRTC communication support...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham who the past several years has focused on fixing many bugs and nuisances with the KDE desktop as well as being well known for his weekly "This Week In KDE" development summaries has been elected to the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. As part of the board, his platform is on fundraising more for KDE and hoping to hire more developers to further accelerate this open-source desktop environment...

After Intel posted a set of patches last week for the GNU Compiler Collection around Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake, and Sierra Forest, the two more basic patches have already been merged into the GCC 13 code-base while the Sierra Forest Xeon E-core patches and the various new instructions presented there are still undergoing review...

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative...

This should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's tendency to ship with bleeding-edge package versions, but Fedora Linux 38 next spring will offer PHP 8.2 for those wanting to run a LAMP stack on this modern, Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Linus Torvalds just issued the first release candidate of Linux 6.1 and in turn marking the end of the merge window for this feature-packaged kernel release. Linux 6.1 stable in turn should be out in December and will likely serve as this year's Linux LTS kernel release...

Following last month's introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, AMD has finally posted the code providing initial enablement for the Zen 4 CPUs with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Google this week has announced the release of KataOS as their newest operating system effort focused on embedded devices running ambient machine learning workloads. KataOS is security-minded, exclusively uses the Rust programming language, and is built atop the seL4 microkernel as its foundation...

The IBM POWER/PowerPC changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.1 kernel with this cycle's merge window closing later today...

For the Linux 6.1 kernel Btrfs is bringing some significant performance optimizations and with EXT4 there is also some performance tuning. But when it comes to the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) and the XFS file-systems this cycle is on the lighter side...

The Xen hypervisor changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.1 kernel merge window that is wrapping up this weekend...

While there has been more open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software solutions in recent years, Ardour that has been in development since 2005 remains one of the best professional-grade and cross-platform digital audio workstation solutions. It's now even better with today's big Ardour 7.0 release...

HP's commercial/business-focused laptops expose a Windows WMI interface that supports the web-based enterprise management of the BIOS configurations. The "HP-BIOSCFG" Linux driver is now being worked on to allow managing the BIOS settings for these HP laptops from within Linux...

The VirtIO changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.1 merge window that is ending this weekend...

A set of 12 patches adding 720 lines of new code and removing 222 lines of existing code to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver have been merged for Mesa 22.3 to help reduce the Vulkan push descriptor CPU overhead...

Among the pull requests coming in late in the merge window for the Linux 6.1 cycle is the "sched/psi" updates for the code improvements around Pressure Stall Information...

Last month Intel published the XeSS 1.0 SDK for their Xe Super Sampling technology showcased with Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards. Sadly their initial SDK drop included Windows binaries and wasn't fully open-source. On Friday XeSS 1.0.1 was published with some bug fixes but still not being fully open-source...

The KDE Plasma Wayland session is finally supporting high resolution scroll wheel support that was engineered by Red Hat and originally supported under GNOME for allowing a smoother scrolling experience on the Linux desktop...

This morning's batch of Linux kernel point releases to existing stable series is worth upgrading to given the important security fixes...

While the freeze ahead of Wine 8.0 is quickly approaching, Wine 7.19 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux and macOS...

Genode Labs as the creators of the open-source Genode Operating System Framework have released Sculpt OS 22.10 as the newest version of their general purpose operating system...

This shouldn't be too surprising to long-time Phoronix readers, but Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux operating system is yielding great performance with AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors. Intel's Clear Linux has long shipped HWCAPS support and tuning for AVX-512 and the like to be able to provide optimized libraries when running on their own AVX-512 processors. But with AMD now joining the AVX-512 party -- and Zen 4's AVX-512 implementation performing great -- Intel's Clear Linux distribution is showing leading performance numbers on these new AMD desktop processors.

Intel has today sent out new compiler patches as they work to get their next-generation processors all set for the open-source GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), including the introduction of some new x86_64 instruction set extensions coming with the high core count Sierra Forest processors...

Brought up in September was the proposal of moving the GNU toolchain infrastructure under the Linux Foundation's IT services. The GNU Toolchain leaders have now come out formally in support of this proposed move...

The 9P network protocol is commonly used -- such as with QEMU's 9pfs pass-through file-system -- for being able to share certain directories/files on host machines with the guest operating systems. With Linux 6.1 the 9p code has seen a nice set of optimizations that can allow for faster communication between the host and guest(s)...

Intel has published their "2022Q3" releases for their open-source Media Driver with VA-API support as well as their Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime...

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver is the open-source, community-developed Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation that is built to make use of NVIDIA's NVDEC interface exposed by their proprietary Linux graphics driver stack. In turn this VA-API implementation is notable since it allows for NVIDIA GPU video acceleration with Firefox that targets VA-API but not the NVIDIA interfaces...

Merged for Mesa 22.3 one month ago was Rusticl as a new OpenCL implementation written in Rust. Since then Karol Herbst of Red Hat, who has led the work on this new driver front-end, has been working to get Rusticl running on more Gallium3D drivers and even atop Zink for execution with Vulkan drivers. Much of his testing/focus so far has been making use of integrated GPUs while an important patch series was merged this evening for discrete GPU fixes...

A set of Linux kernel WiFi stack security issues were made public today. The Linux 6.1 Git kernel has now merged fixes for these vulnerabilities while the fixes also work their way to being back-ported to existing stable series...

The "char/misc" changes landed recently into mainline for the ongoing Linux 6.1 merge window. In addition to many FPGA subsystem updates, this random catch-all driver area of the kernel has also seen many updates to the Habana Labs AI driver for supporting Intel's forthcoming Gaudi2 accelerator...

PostgreSQL 15 is out today as the newest major feature release of this leading open-source database solution...

FEX-Emu as the open-source project aiming for speedy x86/x86_64 games and other software on Arm AArch64 including the likes of Steam has issued their newest feature update. FEX-Emu 2210 is today's newest release for this binary emulator and continues on a nice trajectory for being able to enjoy x86 64-bit binaries on modern Arm Linux systems...

The upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 12 release is codenamed "Bookworm" and is expected to be released in 2023. Meanwhile Debian 13 will be out around 2025 and it was already announced under the Trixie codename. Now today it's been announced that Debian 14 come 2027 will also be known as the "Forky" release...

AMD has been on a streak recently of improving their open-source video acceleration capabilities for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

While initial LoongArch CPU support merged in Linux 5.19, it was still in an immature state and since then missing features and functionality continue to be ironed out. With Linux 6.0 came LoongArch PCI support and other changes while for Linux 6.1 come additional features for this Chinese CPU architecture derived from MIPS64 and some elements of RISC-V...

Longtime open-source developer Keith Packard has announced the release of Picolibc 1.7.9, the newest version of his C library for embedded systems. Picolibc 1.7.9 adds support for several new CPU architectures and other enhancements for his miniature libc implementation...

Mesa's Venus driver provides Vulkan support for VirtIO-GPU since it was merged last year as a creation by Google. As of yesterday, the Venus driver has moved on to exposing Vulkan 1.3 capabilities...

One of the leading test requests at Phoronix around my AMD Zen 4 Linux benchmarking has been some side-by-side comparisons against Microsoft Windows 11. While older, high core count AMD systems have particularly performed very well under Linux against Windows, with new hardware there is sometimes hiccups and various limitations with the at-launch support especially on the open-source Linux side. So for your viewing pleasure today are some initial AMD Ryzen 9 7950X benchmarks under Microsoft Windows 11 22H2 up against Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS and a near-final development snapshot of the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10.

The staging changes for Linux 6.1 aren't particularly notable but of the code churn is lightening the kernel a bit by dropping the old "fwserial" driver that allows for TTY support over IEEE-1394 Firewire connections...

While LLVM Clang is increasingly being used by various developers and organizations for building the mainline Linux kernel as complementary support to the GCC compiler that has long been the predominant compiler target, Intel's ICC compiler has also been able to build the Linux kernel albeit not widely used. Kernel developers are now looking at removing that ICC compiler support...