Phoronix

AMD today published the AMDVLK 2022.Q4.4 open-source Vulkan driver that provides Navi 31 GPU support for this week's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX graphics cards...

Interest and support around Vulkan Video for adding GPU-accelerated video encode/decode to the Vulkan API has been (sadly) rather slow. But at least the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen some new work around enabling H.264 and H.265 video decoding over Vulkan Video...

After nearly two years of development the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment was released today with a wide assortment of improvements...

The QEMU open-source emulator that plays an important role in the Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 7.2 release ahead of the Christmas holidays...

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture improvements have landed in the Linux 6.2 kernel...

It was just earlier this month that the LibreOffice 7.5 Alpha was released and today it's been succeeded by the LibreOffice 7.5 Beta after landing more than one hundred fixes and more than 350 new commits...

Jaegeuk Kim has ushered in the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel, which is headlined by two new features for this file-system...

For those that prefer waiting for the first Mesa point release in a new series before moving to it, Mesa 22.3 is now on the table with Mesa 22.3.1 having been released on Wednesday...

After a half-year of development, Libreboot 20221214 is now available for this downstream of Coreboot that is focused on software freedom and providing fully open-source firmware support. Libreboot also enhances the experience with an automated build system and other changes in the name of software freedom and being user-friendly...

Yesterday it was the GCC Rust front-end "gccrs" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for GCC 13. Today the Modula-2 language front-end also made it over the finish line...

As we approach the end of 2022 and with Intel recently having revealed a January date for introducing Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids", here is a look at how the upstream Linux performance has evolved since the debut of the current-generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors debuted in early 2021. This article is looking at the Xeon Platinum 8380 Linux performance with benchmarks conducted on CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu back when Ice Lake SP first debuted against now on the latest Linux OS releases.

Flang as LLVM's Fortran language front-end has landed support for the -Ofast and -ffast-math compiler flags...

In addition to the in-development Linux 6.2 bringing TDX guest attestation support for use with new processors, another new hardware security feature being enabled with this next kernel release is Asynchronous Exit Notification for Software Guard Extensions (SGX)...

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the AMD Device Library eXtra "ADLX" software development kit intended to help improve integration with third-party software. While nice in theory, for now at least it's Windows-only...

The last piece of the open-source driver equation for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA3" series support on Linux is now properly upstream...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is making progress on being able to run the new Portal RTX game...

The work by Intel engineers the past few months on Call Depth Tracking as a less costly mitigation for Retbleed on Skylake-era processors is now set to be merged for the Linux 6.2 kernel...

Microsoft's Christian Brauner has reached the finish line on his work to create a proper VFS POSIX Access Control List (ACL) API with the code now being merged for Linux 6.2...

The big batch of networking subsystem feature updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window has landed...

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...