Phoronix

MediaTek has not officially announced the MT8186 SoC yet but there has been references to it within Chrome OS sources for months and various speculations about this new Chromebook-focused SoC. With Linux 5.19 there is going to be a lot of MT8186 enablement code landing...

System76 has released a new version of the System76-Scheduler, it's Rust-written CPU scheduler designed to improve desktop responsiveness on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Another week of fixes and backports have collected for Mesa 22.1 and now available for testing in the form of Mesa 22.1-rc4...

Microsoft has made public the source code to the original Microsoft 3D Movie Maker software...

With my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS benchmarking thus far it's been focused on shiny and exciting high-end hardware, the latest flagship desktop processors, and interesting old hardware comparisons. But what about Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on recent but mature hardware platforms? For this round of testing I am looking at the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versus Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance on AMD Ryzen and Intel Core industrial PCs from OnLogic. Especially in the case of AMD Ryzen "Renoir" there is still more performance being squeezed out of this new Ubuntu long-term support release.

Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now...

The latest Btrfs file-system work on its native RAID5/RAID6 mode is now supporting the file-system's sub-page functionality...

The Qualcomm "MSM" DRM/KMS driver is set to see several display improvements with the upcoming Linux 5.19 merge window...

A new Apple SoC CPUFreq driver has been posted by Asahi Linux's Hector Martin with the CPU frequency scaling driver, of course, being important for achieving optimal performance and power/thermal management...

In addition to the recent notable Linux patch series enabling GFX11 graphics and VCN4 video encode/decode for next-generation "RDNA3" GPUs, AMD this week has been posting some additional patch series enabling other intellectual property (IP) blocks for their next-generation hardware...

In addition to driver-core-next having queued up the long-awaited Zstd compressed firmware support ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel, another change readied is allowing support for initiating firmware updates for supported drivers via sysfs...

Merged today into mainline LLVM 15.0 for the Clang compiler is Ampere Computing's support for "Ampere1", their next-generation server processor featuring their in-house "Ampere Cores" core design...

Following AMD completing its Xilinx acquisition back in February, AMD is now preparing to ramp up their investment into embedded Linux. AMD is hiring for the "creation and maintenance" of a Yocto-based Embedded Linux platform for running on Xilinx SoCs...

Intel's Thunderbolt "Light Ridge" controller was introduced all the way back in 2010 for Apple Macs and the updated Intel Thunderbolt 2 "Falcon Ridge" controller is from 2013. Now in 2022 under Linux the Thunderbolt driver will be better matching the Apple macOS behavior when daisy chaining multiple Thunderbolt displays...

The Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II is a standalone keyboard that mimics the traditional ThinkPad notebook's keyboard that comes complete with an integrated TrackPoint. With the Linux 5.19 kernel will be better support for this standalone ThinkPad keyboard...

Mozilla has joined Google Chrome in the three digit version world with Firefox 100 being available this morning...

Already within the Linux kernel there is initial support for tiered memory servers for dealing with platforms like those with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for being able to promote/demote pages to slower classes of memory when the speedy system RAM is under pressure. But with more tiered memory servers coming about especially with HBM classes of memory, Google and other vendors are discussing better handling of Linux's tiered memory interface...

Valve just published the updated Steam Hardware/Software Survey results for April 2022 providing a look at the Linux marketshare for April among other interesting metrics...

A new open-source tool made public by Intel engineers last month aims to help migrate codebases from using OpenACC to OpenMP. In turn the OpenMP-based offloading is preferred for Intel's XPU offloading strategy...

After last week AMD began posting the "GFX11" patches for RDNA3, today AMD published a set of patches enabling the VCN 4.0 IP block for next-generation video encode/decode capabilities...

When it comes to Intel's "i915" DRM kernel driver much of the work lately by the company's open-source engineers have been focused on DG2/Alchemist for Arc Graphics products. There has been some occasional DRM kernel driver patches mentioning their HPC work and Ponte Vecchio "PVC" preparations while sent out today was the first set of patches actually introducing Ponte Vecchio to this kernel driver...

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Linux review, here are some additional Linux benchmarks of this first AMD Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache.

VESA this morning announced an open standard and certification program around variable refresh rate (VRR) performance for AdaptiveSync displays for gaming and also around MediaSync for media playback performance...

Merged in Linux 5.18 is the AMD HSMP driver for enabling the "Host System Management Port" usage under Linux as an interface for enabling additional system management functionality on AMD EPYC 7003 servers. For Linux 5.19 this AMD HSMP driver is set to be extended with additional features coming with next-generation AMD EPYC servers...

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) on Sunday released version 14.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform desktop that started out as a fork of KDE 3.5 from a decade ago and continues seeing advancements from its small but dedicated developer crew...

Intel's latest high profile hire is recruiting Brendan Gregg from Netflix...

Microsoft has joined the Open 3D Foundation that was started by the Linux Foundation when Amazon's Lumberyard game engine went on to form the Open 3D Engine. Microsoft is now backing the Open 3D Foundation and the Open 3D Engine for promoting open-source 3D game and simulation development...

Released on Sunday was GDB 12.1 as the newest version of the GNU Debugger...

While Linux 5.18 had been trending on the lighter/calmer side, Linux 5.18-rc5 was just released and it comes in "a very tiny bit larger" than usual...

Being added to the Linux kernel's driver core code is sysfs support for reporting a physical location of a device on the connected system/server. In particular for large systems and servers with many connected devices and where there may be multiple devices of the same type/model, this physical relative location reporting to user-space should make it easier to distinguish...

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...