Phoronix

The ISC DHCP software was marked end-of-life at the end of 2022 and thus Ubuntu Linux developers have been deciding on a new isc-dhcp-client package replacement to use by default...

Since Linux 5.18 there has been Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) in the mainline kernel that was contributed by Intel as part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). For Linux 6.4 Intel engineers tried to get the Shadow Stack support mainlined as the other part of CET, but issues were uncovered at the last minute. Hopefully Shadow Stack support will be merged for the v6.5 cycle but beyond that host support, Intel engineers have also been working on CET virtualization for enabling these security features for use within virtual machines...

An initial batch of DRM-Misc-Next patches targeting the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer were sent today to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of that next merge window...

Following the recent Plasma 6 developer sprint in Bavaria is an update on the achievements from that KDE developer event. KDE developer Nate Graham published a blog post today that focuses on some of the default changes intended for Plasma 6.0, including hopes of being able to use the Wayland session by default...

AlmaLinux 9.2 is now available for this community-driven, freely-available alternative to upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2. The AlmaLinux crew managed to deliver this release just hours after Red Hat reached general availability on RHEL 9.2 and RHEL 8.8...

Mesa 23.1 has been released as this quarter's feature release for this collection of open-source, user-space graphics components that primarily consist of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

In development for over a half-decade already has been Bcachefs as a copy-on-write (CoW) file-system born originally out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. On Tuesday the Bcachefs patch series was sent out for review and hopeful inclusion into the kernel by lead developer Kent Overstreet...

Going back to last year there's been AMD GFX940 work within the LLVM compiler for its AMDGPU compiler back-end. That AMD GFX940 should align to the Instinct MI300 while introduced to the latest LLVM compiler code today are new GFX941 and GFX942 targets...

Going back to last August were Intel patches to help Intel hybrid CPU handling on Linux by avoiding unnecessary task migrations within SMT domains. Coming this summer those Intel patches are finally set to arrive with the Linux 6.5 kernel cycle...

A new version of Lighttpd is out today, the BSD-licensed, open-source web server that focuses on being very speedy and lightweight on CPU and memory resources...

Following the Corsair MP700 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD review under Linux with many readers being surprised by file-system errors when not adding extra cooling like the motherboard's passive M.2 heatsink and being curious about the situation myself, here are more tests of ultimately how this drive will reliably hit file-system errors in three minutes or less without added cooling...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver within Mesa is now enabling graphics pipeline libraries (GPL) functionality by default but at the same time has demoted their Vulkan mesh shader functionality to being hidden behind an environment variable until some unexplained hangs can be sorted out...

While DXVK is used by Steam Play for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 APIs atop Vulkan and there is also VKD3D-Proton for Direct3D 12 on Vulkan, D8VK's aim is for the aging Microsoft Direct3D 8 API atop Vulkan for enhancing the experience of older games on Linux...

Alpine Linux 3.18 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built with musl libc and Busybox while being popular for embedded and container use-cases...

Last week Corsair announced the MP700 series as their first PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives. While the performance is quite speedy for sequential reads and writes, in practice this drive struggled under Linux with real-world workloads. When not adding an after-market heatsink, the MP700 was quick to exhibit EXT4 file-system errors.

Intel today published 38 new security advisories in their first Patch Tuesday roundabout since February. Among the new disclosures today are CVE-2023-28410 as an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability that could lead to local privilege escalation...

While Intel's in-development Xe kernel graphics driver is focused on supporting Tigerlake/Gen12 graphics and newer integrated/discrete graphics with this modern open-source driver with many design improvements over the aging i915 kernel driver, there looks to be one feature that as currently positioned will be missing for DG2/Alchemist: HuC support for helping with media offloading...

Sadly missing out on the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window by a few days is support for sensor monitoring with the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E Hero motherboard...

Adding to the list of features coming with QEMU 8.1 is now having a native PipeWire audio back-end...

While missing out on the recently-closed Linux 6.4 merge window, one of the patch series seeing a lot of activity in recent weeks/months has been around parallel CPU bring-up in order to speed-up the Linux kernel boot process for today's high-end desktops and many-core servers...

Mozilla is officially releasing Firefox 113 today and as usual the release binaries are already available for this monthly web browser update...

While there are sadly many tech layoffs happening, one company that continues hiring at least on the Linux side is AMD. A new job posting was made today with AMD looking to recruit another developers to work on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack -- in particular, with the AMD Radeon Mesa code...

With Linux 6.4-rc1 released, here is my original overview of all the interesting changes coming for the Linux 6.4 kernel that will be released as stable at the end of June or in early July.

While GCC 13.1 recently released as the first major stable release of the GCC 13 series, for those continuing to depend upon last year's GCC 12 stable series there is a new point release available today...

Development of the NVK open-source NVIDIA Mesa Vulkan driver is being done in part on a nearly decade old GeForce GTX 980M mobile graphics processor since at the moment it's one of the more recent NVIDIA GPUs that can be re-clocked using the existing Nouveau kernel driver code...

One of the recent change proposals for the in-development Fedora 39 is to ship systemd's mkosi-initrd as a modern and superior alternative to Dracut for constructing initrds...

In development for several years now has been TrenchBoot as a framework for creating security engines to perform system launch integrity actions. This boot-time integrity framework continues advancing and this past week Oracle engineers posted their latest patches for the Linux kernel in providing dynamic launch support...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc1 that also marks the end of the merge window for the exciting Linux 6.4 cycle...

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used, open-source bootable RAM testing software. In February marked memtest86+ 6.10 with UEFI Secure Boot signing and other new features. Out today is now memtest86+ 6.20 where a driving focus for this release is on improving support for older hardware...

FEX-Emu 2305 has been released, the open-source project continuing to work on x86_64 atop 64-bit ARM (AArch64) emulation support for being able to enjoy more games on ARM Linux and other software not otherwise natively available...

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors...

Going back years there has been patches for allowing the Linux x86_64 kernel to build as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code to further enhance the system security. Antgroup engineers most recently have been tackling the Linux x86_64 PIE support and last week sent out a new patch series...

Intel Shaodw Stack support was submitted for Linux 6.4 at the start of the merge window but now with this two-week merge window drawing to a close, it hasn't been pulled yet and Linus Torvalds raised technical issues with the proposed patches that now jeopardize its arrival this cycle...

While the Linux 6.4 merge window is closing this weekend, today on the last full day of the period is Jens Axboe submitting pipe FMODE_NOWAIT support as what he's described as a big performance and efficiency improvement...

One of the missing RISC-V features now in place for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is system hibernation / suspend-to-disk support...

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs...

While these days Linus Torvalds is mostly dealing with herding new code into the Linux kernel and being a gate keeper rather than actively developing new kernel code himself, for the in-development Linux 6.4 he's found himself doing a bit of coding...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham shared that key KDE developers are currently in Germany for an in-person Plasma 6.0 development sprint...

Today's Steam client beta will be a delight for some Linux gamers with the Steam client finally recognizing the GNOME and KDE desktop global scaling factor for text sizing...

For those that haven't yet watched the AMD openSIL presentation from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague from April, the most interesting takeaway was deserving of its own article... AMD openSIL is planned to eventually replace the well known AGESA and that it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack -- just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned but will support all AMD processors...

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward...

Going back to mid-2022 AMD engineers have been working on Virtual NMI support with SVM for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an efficiency optimization. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the AMD VNMI support has been merged...

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support...

Chinese tech company Loongson continues working on improving the upstream Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired domestic CPU architecture. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is another batch of optimizations and implementing more kernel functionality for the LoongArch CPU architecture...

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media...

Dav1d as the open-source AV1 video decoder developed as part of the VideoLAN project is out with a new minor feature release...

A new set of patches were posted today to enable cluster scheduling for x86 hybrid CPUs. In turn thos latest attempt at cluster scheduling for modern Core CPUs of Alder Lake and newer is yielding some small performance benefits over the current code...

Merged today to LLVM 17 Git is now recognizing -std=c++23 rather than just -std=c++2b for the Clang compiler now that C++23 has been deemed technically complete...

Recently I noticed out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux the performance of Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was much improved for some workloads compared to tests done just weeks ago on the same Sapphire Rapids server. It ended up being an issue coming full-circle and ultimately boils down to one line of code added within the Linux kernel.

It's been just under two years since Amazon's Lumberyard game engine was spun into the Open 3D Engine and the Open 3D Foundation established under the Linux Foundation. Today the project is celebrating its newest open-source game engine update with Open 3D Engine 23.05...