Phoronix

It was an exciting April in the open-source world from AMD continuing work on bringing up next-gen GPU and Zen 4 CPU support under Linux, some portions of NVIDIA kernel driver code being published on the Tegra side, Intel continuing DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics preparations, Mesa 22.1 nearing release, the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and much more...

The Google Hangouts Meet Speakermic is a device manufactured by ASUS that allows for 360 degree sound input/output designed for Google Hangout usage and allows daisy-chaining up to five of these speakermics together for use in large conference rooms. A Linux driver is on the way for the device just to address a mute button issue...

With GCC 12.1 due for release in roughly the next week or so, Red Hat's Marek Polacek penned a new blog post this week outlining many of the C++ language improvements to be found in this major GNU Compiler Collection update...

Building off the recent release of Genode OS 22.02 as the open-source operating system framework, Sculpt OS 22.04 was released this week as the project's effort around producing a general purpose operating system...

Sent in as a "fix" this week for the Linux 5.18 kernel and to be found in tomorrow's 5.18-rc5 release is supporting sensor readings with the Gigabyte-WMI driver for the Gigabyte B660 GAMING X DDR4 motherboard...

AMD continues working on their open-source Linux driver support for next-gen GPUs... The latest patches posted on Friday are for "GFX11", pointing to the major new graphics IP version with RDNA3 graphics processors due out later this year...

As part of Mesa preparing to drop its old GLSL to TGSI code path and routing more Mesa drivers through using the NIR intermediate representation, the Nouveau Gallium3D driver code has switched to using this modern IR by default...

Fedora Linux is looking at tightening up its cryptographic policies with next year's Fedora 38/39 releases but for Fedora 37 later this year they will likely begin warning users around the planned changes...

Loongson engineers continue working on aiming to upstream their LoongArch CPU architecture support in the Linux kernel...

KDE this week saw more components converted to using Qt Quick, among other features and improvements to the KDE Plasma desktop...

As part of my many different benchmarks being carried out due to the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release, I was curious to do a broader Linux server performance look over the past several long-term support releases of Ubuntu Linux. For making this happen I used an AMD EPYC 7601 2P as the original EPYC "Naples" server platform that can go as far back as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for software compatibility and then seeing how it has evolved with the 18.04, 20.04, and now 22.04 operating system updates.

A change merged to Mesa 22.2 on Thursday adds a Meson build option for being able to optionally control the video codecs supported by Mesa for its video encoding/decoding paths...

Redox OS 0.6 released back for Christmas 2020 while it has now finally been succeeded by Redox OS 0.7 for this Rust-written open-source operating system...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory now has their Kripke software ported to running on AMD's HIP for GPU acceleration...

Bringing back memories from the time that Fedora multi-week release delays were pretty much a given, Fedora Linux 36 has once again been delayed and now won't be out until at least 10 May...

While most of the Linux pre-loaded laptops these days ship with GNOME or a desktop derived from GNOME components, the Kubuntu Focus has been one of the most notable exceptions for using KDE Plasma and also optimized for workflows around deep learning, programming, dev ops, and more. Today the company announced the Kubuntu Focus M2 Gen4 laptop with upgraded hardware...

The GCC 12 compiler code-base has reached zero P1 regressions (the highest priority) and thus the GCC 12 compiler code has been branched from mainline, a release candidate is imminent, and if all goes well GCC 12.1.0 as the stable release could be out as soon as the end of next week...

In addition to "Fwupd Friendly Firmware" getting off the ground, this week also marks Fwupd 1.8 as the newest version of this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy system and component firmware updating on Linux and other platforms...

Last week AMD quietly launched the Radeon RX 6400 series as the new low-end RDNA2 graphics. With Radeon RX 6400 there are finally low-profile, single-slot PCIe RDNA2 graphics cards whether they be for 2U servers, mini ITX builds, or other interesting use-cases. Up for testing today is an XFX Radeon RX 6400 4GB low-profile graphics card for Linux benchmarking.

As written about earlier this week, concerns have been raised over the "new" NTFS Linux driver that it's effectively unmaintained already less than one year after being mainlined. Linus Torvalds has since commented on the matter and opens up the door for other developers to maintain it...

A few patch series were fired off yesterday for enabling new IP blocks on upcoming Radeon graphics processors...

Valve overnight released a beta of SteamOS 3.2 with some notable improvements for Steam Deck users...

One of Mesa's smaller drivers that continues advancing but not receiving as much attention as the big names is Etnaviv for providing open-source, reverse-engineered graphics support for Vivante graphics IP used across different SoCs...

Mesa 22.1 is gearing up for release in early to mid May while out today is the third weekly release candidate. Mesa 22.1-rc3 continues in back-porting many fixes and improvements from the feature code building up for next quarter's Mesa 22.2...

The Linux Foundation based Yocto Project for making it easy to create Linux-based IoT/embedded operating system software builds is out today with Yocto 4.0...

It's been a rough year for floppy disk support on Linux and goes to show the state of seldom maintained to unmaintained code...

Intel open-source engineers sent in their initial batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" updates to DRM-Next today destined for the Linux 5.19 merge window...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has launched Fwupd Friendly Firmware as a new initiative for selecting original equipment/device manufacturers to select ICs that already boast Fwupd plug-ins for easing the integration of firmware updating support under Linux...

While AMD long ago stopped actively contributing to the open-source R600 Gallium3D driver on Linux systems for OpenGL on Radeon HD 2000 "R600" through Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" graphics cards, thanks to a few open-source community developers this Mesa driver code continues seeing improvements even with the Radeon HD 6000 series already being more than one decade old. The latest on the R600g front are various efforts improving the GPU compute support...

With last week's release of the much anticipated Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced they would begin providing a real-time kernel flavor too for this Long Term Support release though that RT kernel is initially in beta form. Today they outlined more information on their real-time kernel beta and how to actually go about trying it out...

LLVM 14.0.1 released just earlier this month while already LLVM 14.0.2 is out today. LLVM normally sees just a single point release and traditionally happened mid-to-late in the development cycle ahead of LLVM's next major release. But now LLVM is moving to shipping point releases every two weeks...

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering is out with his first blog post since last September. Today he's relaying the power of the systemd-sysext component shipped as part of systemd for loading/merging "system extension" images on the system for manipulating the exposed /usr...

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) alongside WineConf has been formally announced for this co-located event planned to happen in-person this October in Minnesota...

Chrome 101 is out today as stable for the newest feature update to Google's cross-platform web browser...

One of the Linux patch series that has been in the works for years in conjunction with Clang compiler side changes and already being responsible for exposing hundreds of kernel bugs is the KernelMemorySanitizer (KMSAN). Sent out today was the latest patch series working on the kernel infrastructure for catching uninitialized memory issues...

Google today announced the first public beta of Android 13...

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver stack so far has been focused on Midgard and Bifrost architectures but the newer Valhall graphics support is beginning to materialize. Since last year the developers involved have been working heavy on reverse engineering and bringing up Valhall. More of that Valhall driver support landed today...

NVIDIA released the 510.68.02 Linux driver today as a very minor bug-fix release...

Oracle this morning published the GraalVM Community Edition 22.1 feature release for this high-performance Java/JDK distribution that also provides runtimes for JavaScript, Python, and other languages...

While Intel launched the Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics at the end of Q1, so far at least in major US markets no laptops with these graphics are currently available. As such it's hard to assess the current Linux driver support level and with no clear communication from Intel on the matter. Intel has been working on their upstream DG2/Alchemist support for a while but it looks like with the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer is what will likely be their base version requirement for the DG2/Alchemist-based Intel GPUs...

Back in 2020 file-system driver provider Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel. This driver was previously a proprietary, commercial offering from the company but given the state of NTFS these days they wanted to upstream this driver with full read/write support and other features not found within the existing NTFS driver. Finally last year after going through many rounds of review, the new driver was merged into Linux 5.15. Sadly, less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained...

It looks like Linux 5.19 will have all the base preparations in place for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support...

Originally attempted with Linux 5.18 were patches so /dev/urandom and /dev/random would behave exactly the same. That was dropped though due to not enough randomness at boot for some platforms like Arm 32-bit, Motorola m68k, Microblaze, Xtensa, and others. But then the change went in to opportunistically initialize /dev/random as a best-effort approach where it at least works nicely on x86/x86_64. The good news is that original unification effort may be re-visited in the future now that the original blocker issue has been addressed...

VMware has merged support for SVGAv3 into Mesa 22.2. SVGAv3 is the latest update to their virtual graphics device for allowing 3D guest virtual machine acceleration with VMware's virtualization products...

In order to fully support Direct3D Indirect Drawing for allowing more rendering tasks to be moved from the CPU to the GPU, the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is working on experimental code for effectively hosting "a driver on the GPU."..

SDL 2.0.22 is now officially out as the newest version of this widely-used library by multi-platform games and other software for abstracting various input, graphics, and other system details...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard shared they have setup a GitLab instance for Wine development -- currently as an experiment but they hope it will lead to boosting their workflow for working on this open-source software moving forward...

System76 has released Pop!_OS 22.04 as the newest version of their Linux distribution downstream based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Last week AMD began shipping the much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D as their first 3D V-Cache consumer CPU and their claims to be "the world's fastest PC gaming processor" in being able to outperform even the Core i9 12900K / 12900KS for Windows gaming. We weren't seeded by AMD for this launch, leading us to anticipate that it's not too good for Linux gaming / not their target market. But after the great success I've had with AMD Milan-X performance on Linux, I was very eager to try out this consumer CPU with the 3D-stacked L3 cache and ended up purchasing a 5800X3D. Indeed the Ryzen 7 5800X3D turned out to be disappointing for Linux gaming performance but the 5800X3D was very interesting for a range of other technical workloads and making me very excited for future Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

For two years there has been interest and unmerged patches for allowing Linux's plethora of firmware blobs to be Zstd-compressed for helping to save disk space. Finally it looks like for Linux 5.19 that optional Zstd firmware compression support will be merged...