Phoronix

Last week the EXT4 file-system feature updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

Intel today is formally introducing their Arc 3 series mobile graphics that will begin appearing in laptops beginning in April while Arc 5 and Arc 7 graphics are coming out in the "early summer" for the much anticipated Intel discrete graphics offerings.

Right now under Linux it isn't quick and easy to figure out if the likes of (Transparent) Secure Memory Encryption are enabled and working but a new patch series will more easily expose the security attributes of the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) to users on Linux. Among the information to be exposed will also include whether the CPU is fused in the name of tampering prevention...

Back in January Intel engineers released SVT-AV1 0.9 with significant speed-ups to this open-source AV1 encoder while now as we roll into Q2, SVT-AV1 v1.0 is being readied for launch...

Part of the mainline kernel has been Tegra-VDE as an originally reverse-engineered NVIDIA Tegra video decode driver. After much work on that driver by developer Dmitry Osipenko, it's been promoted out of "staging" with Linux 5.18 among other media subsystem changes...

The first release candidate of systemd 251 is now available for testing as a rather large update to this Linux init system and service manager...

In continuation of last week's article that the GCC steering committee approved landing of LoongArch as a new port to this MIPS-derived Chinese CPU architecture, the code was merged on Tuesday...

It's coming a week late due to a scheduling mishap but in any event today marks the first stable point release to the Mesa 22.0 series for open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Chrome 100 is out today with Google's multi-platform web browser now up to a three digit version...

For those still intrigued by Finnish outfit Jolla and their work on the Linux-based smartphone OS Sailfish, their v4.4 "Vanha Rauma" update is out today...

After a slight delay the Fedora 36 beta images are officially available today...

Vulkan 1.3.210 is out today with various specification corrections/clarifications but also two notable extensions...

As expected and following months of rumors and leaks, NVIDIA today formally unveiled the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti as their newest flagship graphics card...

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" less than one month out from release, I have begun testing it on more desktop and server platforms ahead of release. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS overall is in nice shape. On current generation platforms I am not seeing much uplift compared to Ubuntu 21.10 but for those still making use of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS series with its older compiler and other older packages, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is providing some uplift. Here is a look at Ubuntu 20.04.4 vs. 21.10 vs. 22.04 daily on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

Earlier this year with the Intel Media Driver 22 there was enablement of "ATS-M" with references to "Arctic Sound Mainstream" . Now the Linux kernel patches have arrived with the changes needed on their end for this DG2-based discrete GPU that now sums up ATS-M as a display-less GPU for servers...

The sound subsystem updates were sent in last week for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window. There is a lot of new audio hardware enablement and other improvements to find with this sound pull for the new kernel...

Hyperscaler problems these days? Linux servers taking too long to reboot due to having too many NVMe drives. Thankfully Google is working on an improvement to address this where some of their many-drive servers can take more than one minute for the Linux kernel to carry out its shutdown tasks while this work may benefit other users too albeit less notably...

Back in 2020 the Linux kernel tried adding flexible array members to replace zero length arrays but that time the code was reverted shortly thereafter. For Linux 5.18 the tree-wide change of replacing zero length arrays with C99 flexible array members was merged and appears to be all in good shape this time...

EROFS as a reminder is the read-only Linux file-system originally introduced four years ago that has gone on to see some use particularly by Android devices. While there hasn't been much to report on EROFS in recent time, they are approaching some new functionality in coming kernels...

Earlier this month I wrote about Microsoft engineers wanting to add DirectX and HLSL support into the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler. As of this week the very early bits of code are beginning to land in LLVM 15.0 for this Microsoft graphics effort...

After being years in development, the Intel PECI subsystem is landing for the Linux 5.18 kernel...

Intel today announced the Core i9 12900KS as "the world's fastest desktop processor" with a 5.5GHz maximum turbo frequency...

While last year saw initial Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing merged into Mesa's "RADV" driver, the work remains experimental but bit by bit is becoming more mature and capable...

Last week the power management changes landed for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel with a number of changes in tow, including notable items for both AMD and Intel processors...

Debuting on the Arch Linux monthly ISOs a year ago was Archinstall as a way to carry out quick and easy installations of this popular Linux distribution. Over the past year Archinstall has matured into increasingly robust shape for quickly installing Arch Linux...

A subtle but notable change worth mentioning last week for LLVM Clang 15.0 is "-march=native" now working for this compiler when running on Apple M1 SoCs...

The initial batch of KVM virtualization changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

In addition to supporting the Tesla FSD chip, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and other new Arm SoCs in Linux 5.18, this kernel will also be more secure for 64-bit Arm with adding Shadow Call Stack support...

The RISC-V CPU architecture updates have landed for the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel...

There has been a known problem for some time that with the increasing number of different Wayland compositors out there, there is a lot of fragmentation when it comes to display EDID/DisplayID handling. Thankfully libdisplay-info has been started with hopes of addressing that issue...

WirePlumber is the increasingly used session/policy manager for PipeWire for audio/video streams on the Linux desktop. Out this weekend is WirePlumber 0.4.9 with some important fixes and improvements...

The many USB and Thunderbolt feature patches have landed into the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly summary of all the notable KDE changes to land in the past week...

The Ceph file-system updates for this scalable distributed storage system have landed for Linux 5.18 with some fairly noteworthy fixes...

MGLRU is a kernel innovation we've been eager to see merged in 2022 and it looks like that could happen for the next cycle, v5.19, for improving Linux system performance especially in cases of approaching memory pressure...

Debian 12 "Bookworm" is coming next year while out this weekend is Debian 11.3 as the newest update in the "Bullseye" series...

Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) that is part of Intel's Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) found with Tiger Lake CPUs and newer is landing for the Linux 5.18 kernel...

Building off DXVK 1.10 released at the start of the month, we are now ending out March with DXVK 1.10.1 for this translation layer used for running Direct3D 9/10/11 games over the Vulkan API on Linux systems...

The XFS file-system updates have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

I was informed that AMD has a few more Linux positions open at the company. While they have in past years been rather nimble with their Linux staffing, things continue to change thanks to their ongoing successes in the marketplace from the consumer side with Steam Deck through the likes of Tesla's infotainment system up through high-end server platforms...

Longtime Linux game porter and SDL developer Ryan Gordon released SDL_sound 2.0 as the first release of this sound component to the Simple DirectMedia Library in nearly fourteen years...

As we approach the end of the first week of the Linux 5.18 merge window, another note worthy pull request to land is the switching of the C language standard from GNU89 (C89) to GNU11 (C11)...

Following the recent developer discussions around deprecating and removing the ReiserFS file-system from the mainline kernel, the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel is going ahead and deprecating it...

The GCC steering committee has signed off on the LoongArch compiler port and could still land for the GCC 12 stable compiler release in a few weeks...

Wine 7.5 is out as the latest bi-weekly software update for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.1 is the "Dozen" project implementing Vulkan atop Direct3D 12 APIs...

AMD today released Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0 under their GPUOpen umbrella as this library to better manage memory allocation and resources for this graphics API and make it more similar to APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D...

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 5.18 kernel merge window. This pull request includes a number of notable additions we have been talking about over recent weeks and months on Phoronix...

Following our how-to guide for enabling the new AMD P-State driver that premiered in Linux 5.17 after finding many users were unsure to go about using this new CPU frequency scaling driver, AMD is now making it easier to switch from ACPI CPUFreq to AMD P-State...

Introduced back in 2019 by the VIA + Shanghai owned Zhaoxin was the ZX-E / KX-6000 series x86_64 processors. Finally in 2022 the proper GCC compiler tuning support has been published for these processors that are part of the "Lujiazui" microarchitecture...