Phoronix

Released last month was Cemu 2.0 as open-source software and with Linux support for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that for years has been in development but up to that point closed-source and Windows-only. Cemu 2.0 continues advancing with another bug-fixing update out today...

Endeavour OS 22.9 "Artemis Nova" is out today as the newest version of this enthusiast-oriented Linux distribution built around Arch Linux...

Ahead of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4, it's a lot of fresh CPU re-testing at Phoronix under Linux with the bleeding-edge software stack of the latest Linux kernel as well as many new/updated benchmarks, the latest motherboard BIOSes, and more. As over the past year there has been a lot of work by Intel open-source engineers around better tuning the Linux kernel for their hybrid architecture, here are some fresh side-by-side benchmarks of the Intel Core i9 12900K against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

Mike Blumenkrantz has been working under contract for Valve on the open-source Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Mesa but that work has carried over into the Mesa Vulkan drivers too where there is common overlap. His recent work has been focused on lowering the CPU overhead of some operations with the RADV Vulkan driver...

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project...

Meta/Facebook has turned to kernel live-patching (KLP) with Red Hat's Kpatch the the Linux kernel livepatch infrastructure to handle live updates to "several million servers". Meta engineers shared during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference around the successes they've had with it as well as troubles encountered along the way...

As a follow-up to the recent article about Mesa preparing a software fallback for S3TC, that code was merged for next quarter's Mesa 22.3...

A change queued in HID-next ahead of the Linux 6.1 cycle aims to enable HID++ protocol usage for all Logitech Bluetooth devices...

Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year...

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics driver developer and DRM subsystem maintainer, David Airlie of Red Hat, took the stage at Linux Plumbers Conference today to talk about Nouveau and the state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Samba as the open-source re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol for better file and print server interoperability with Microsoft Windows platforms is out with a new release. In the nearly six months since Samba 4.16 was introduced, Samba 4.17 has built up performance improvements/fixes and other enhancements for this widely-used open-source project...

Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source game engine. Also announced today that the new start-up W4 Games that was started by Godot Engine developers has managed to raise $8.5M USD to support this open-source game engine ecosystem...

Fedora 37 beta has been successfully released on-time as a development test release ahead of next month's planned stable release...

AMD landed several new GPU firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository this morning for unreleased hardware...

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing...

TrenchBoot is the project backed by Oracle and other stakeholders for providing a boot-time integrity framework that builds upon boot integrity technologies and roots of trust for ensuring system integrity, network attestation launch, and other security use-cases...

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.4 was published this morning and significant with this new open-source Vulkan driver version is finally seeing ray-tracing support from this driver...

A new open-source driver has been posted for supporting the WMI interface found with newer Dell systems. This platform driver allows for reading battery properties like the temperature and IDs as well as additional fan/thermal sensor information...

Held today during the first day of Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin was a Rust mini-conference about the ongoing work on making Rust a suitable systems programming language and integrating support for Rust within the mainline Linux kernel. There were many interesting talks from the status of the Rust integration from the Linux kernel to a Rust-written NVMe driver that can perform as well as the C written driver...

Google for quite some time now has been working on "Ghost" as a means of controlling the Linux kernel scheduler from user-space and/or eBPF programs. Ghost provides an extensive API so developers can alter the kernel's scheduler behavior from user-space or eBPF and fine-tune the scheduling behavior based on system preferences...

Since NTFS3 was mainlined last year in the Linux kernel as a modern NTFS read/write file-system driver developed by Paragon Software, it's mostly just been some fixes since then and other minor updates. A new NTFS3 patch series sent out today is at least preparing a new feature for this kernel driver...

One of many changes to find with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release is Debuginfod integration...

Now that Ubuntu 22.10 is into its feature freeze and its Linux 5.19 based kernel landed as well as moving to the GCC 12.2 compiler, I've begun testing this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release on more systems. For the current-flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors, Ubuntu 22.10 does deliver some performance advantages over the current Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS release. However, Ubuntu 22.10 still trails in a distance behind Intel's own Clear Linux platform for the most aggressive out-of-the-box performance.

The PyTorch Foundation has been formed under the Linux Foundation umbrella by Meta (Facebook), AMD, AWS, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to focus on providing the leading-edge AI framework...

A number of improvements to the XPad input driver are slated to be included with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel to better handle the Microsoft Xbox controllers and other derivative designs...

Karol Herbst of Red Hat has seen his new "Rusticl" implementation merged into mainline Mesa! Mesa 22.3 next quarter will introduce this new Rust-written OpenCL 3.0 implementation that will hopefully be more successful than the existing Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL driver...

David Rheinsberg of Red Hat who is a contributor to systemd, BUS1, KMSCON, and other projects over the years is leading an effort seeking to get Rust's UEFI firmware targets promoted to a tier-2 class...

Added to the mainline Linux kernel last year was a Aquacomputer HWMON driver for initially supporting the German company's water-cooling pump under Linux with access to the fan speed, power, voltage, current, and coolant temperature. Since then that open-source driver developed by the community has been extended to cover an Aquacomputer fan controller and different models. For the Linux 6.1 cycle coming up there are more additions to the Aquacomputer driver...

Last week Laminar Research promoted X-Plane 12 to its early access public beta phase. This realistic flight simulator continues to natively support Linux -- and doing so well for many years -- and now with X-Plane 12, the Vulkan steps up past their long-used OpenGL renderer...

The Linux Plumbers Conference has returned to being an in-person event and is running today through Wednesday in Dublin, Ireland...

Linus Torvalds has just announced Linux 6.0-rc5 as the latest test release of Linux 6.0 that is working its way toward a stable release in early October...

Disclosed back in March was the Spectre-BHB / Branch History Injection (BHI) speculative execution vulnerability that on the Arm side affected CPUs from the likes of the Cortex-A15 through A78 series as well as the likes of the X1, X2, and A710, plus the Neoverse E1 / N1 / N2 / V1 CPUs. Now for Linux 6.1, a command-line option is being added for ARM64 to be able to disable the Spectre-BHB mitigation due to the "great impact" to performance...

For those recently picking up an ASUS laptop powered by AMD Ryzen Mobile 6000 series "Rembrandt" SoCs or considering such a device, AMD has prepared a set of fixes for the suspend-to-idle support...

The Device Tree (DT) files needed by the Linux kernel for Apple Macs powered by the M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra SoCs have been submitted on the kernel mailing list for review and working their way towards upstream...

As part of the multi-year effort to overhaul the Linux kernel's printk() code there has been much work in recent months around threaded console printing so each registered console would have a kernel thread and console printing would be decoupled from the printk() callers. That work was aimed for Linux 5.19 but then reverted due to troubles. There is now a new implementation in the works...

FLAC 1.4 was released on Friday as the "Free Lossless Audio Codec" that is known for its great, no-cost lossless compression for digital audio...

Last month Intel began landing oneVPL support within FFmpeg as their video processing and acceleration library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit. The oneVPL Video Processing Library supports CPU-based execution as well as native Intel GPU acceleration for their latest Gen12/Xe hardware with a focus on Arc Graphics / DG2 hardware, targeting the Intel Media SDK for their older GPUs, and can be adapted for other possible back-ends...

Canonical used to host a stellar in-person event each Ubuntu Linux development cycle with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. That was over a decade ago and then it became largely a virtual event and then faded away in favor of Canonical's internal road-map planning and other developer sprints among their employees. Coming up in November in Prague is the return of an in-person official event with the Ubuntu Summit...

The Debian project today released Debian 11.5 and Debian 10.13 as the newest versions of their free GNU/Linux operating system...

AMD engineers are working to better optimize the Linux kernel's scheduler for split-LLC (last level cache) processor designs, namely to benefit their EPYC server processors...

Sent out as a "request for comments" on Friday night was a new patch series out of Intel introducing the notion of "classes of tasks" for the Linux kernel so that the scheduler can make better decisions on hybrid processors like with Intel's Alder Lake processors and upcoming Raptor Lake. This also provides a more complete implementation of Intel Thread Director for Linux and may also be used as the basis for instruction set differences between the performance and efficient cores...

Intel engineers have submitted another batch of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.1 that include updated GuC firmware version handling, more DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics work, and also more Meteor Lake "MTL" enablement for that successor to Raptor Lake...

Fedora Linux releases whether they be development/beta snapshots or the stable releases are known for slipping all too often. Fedora will often delay due to blocker bugs as they aim to deliver a bleeding-edge yet reliable Linux distribution and thus a week or two delay here and there isn't uncommon at all. While they have been delivering more timely releases than in the past with their notorious delays, for Fedora Linux 37 Beta they have delivered on the feat of an on-time release...

KDE Plasma 5.26 is due for release on 11 October while the Plasma 5.26 beta is planned for next week. As such the developers involved have been quite busy with finishing touches ahead of the beta...

Following the news from this summer of Zstd compression being eyed for use within LLVM, the code has begun being merged to allow for Zstd-compressed ELF debug sections as an alternative to the long-used Zlib...

Wine 7.17 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release but due to the US Labor Day this past week seems to be a driving factor in this update coming in rather small...

Over the past year AMD engineers have been developing the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver as an alternative to the long-used ACPI CPUFreq driver to provide better performance/power efficiency with Zen 2 and newer Ryzen/EPYC processors. Today they have now introduced AMD P-State EPP as they aim to deliver better performance-per-Watt...

VMware's performance engineering team today announced a performance regression in Linux 5.19 affecting compute performance up to -70%, networking up to -30%, and storage up to -13%. But the unfortunate thing is the heavy hitting regressions are known and a side effect of the Intel Retbleed mitigation for older processors...

OpenSUSE has today made available their Leap Micro 5.3 Beta operating system as the lightweight, immutable OS intended for edge / embedded / IoT use-cases...