Phoronix

This week brought "an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements" and other changes to the KDE desktop stack...

There hasn't been clear guidance from Valve whether Steam Deck units will participate in the Steam Survey (I haven't seen any survey myself there either) but it's looking like possibly not as the Steam on Linux marketshare dipped lower in March...

Lutris as the open-source game manager that is popular with Linux gamers for managing titles across the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other sources. Today's Lutris 0.5.10 release brings support for the Steam Deck along with other improvements...

Last week saw the main KVM virtualization pull for the Linux 5.18 feature updates while sent in today was a second batch of improvements for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine...

Ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window ending this weekend, the driver for Microsoft's exFAT file-system saw its pull request today. There are just two patches this cycle for exFAT but both changes are significant...

AMD's GPUOpen team today announced "Orochi" as their latest open-source software offering in the HIP GPU compute space...

The GCC 12 compiler will make its stable introduction in the coming weeks. While under the final "stage 4" development of the compiler focused on regression fixes, a last minute AMD Zen 3 (znver3) tuning tweak has landed...

Last week Intel engineers released Sound Open Firmware 2.1, the newest feature update to their open-source audio DSP firmware stack that has also begun seeing some AMD support and other platforms too like NXP i.MX8...

While Jason Donenfeld is known for his splendid work on the open-source WireGuard secure network tunnel technology, lately he's been driving a number of improvements into the random/RNG code for the Linux kernel...

FreeBSD 13.1 continues working its way towards release later in April...

Linux input subsystem maintainer has sent in its batch of changes for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

FreeType as the widely-used, open-source library for font rendering is out with FreeType 2.12 as its first big feature release since last summer...

Here is a look back at the most-read stories on Phoronix during Q1'22 with our daily content around Linux hardware, open-source news, and lots of benchmarking...

Following this week's release of Chrome 100, Google has now published the Chrome 101 web browser beta...

In working toward the official Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release on 21 April, today Canonical and the Ubuntu community have announced the beta release...

The Qt Company announced they will be maintaining the Qt 5.15 long-term support (LTS) code-base by an additional two years...

There still is a few days left to the Linux 5.18 merge window but already I've started firing up benchmarks of this new kernel on a handful of desktops and servers so far. One benchmark though in particular has been showing a staggering performance drop on Linux 5.18 on multiple systems but overall Linux 5.18 in my testing thus far has been working out well...

Earlier this year was news of (open)SUSE developing "D-Installer" as a new web-based distro installer. D-Installer is to complement YaST's existing Qt/CLI installer front-ends and would open up Web UI support, a better UI, and enhanced integration via the D-Bus installer service. The first public release of openSUSE with this new installer is now available for testing...

Building off the Radeon ROCm 5.0 series introduced in February, AMD is ending out Q1 by launching the Radeon Open eCosystem 5.1 series...

It's been over one month already since the release of XWayland 22.1 while this morning v22.1.1 was issued with a handful of bug fixes...

At the moment the Radeon Software for Linux 21.50.2 is AMD's latest packaged graphics driver intended for enterprise Linux distributions. But Radeon Software for Linux 22.10 should soon be announced and can already be fetched from their package archive...

Sent out last week amid the busy Linux 5.18 merge window days were the patch series wiring up an Apple NVMe driver for use with the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max SoCs...

For Fedora 37 later this year the Linux distribution is looking at providing support for zero touch onboarding for IoT / edge devices...

The GNU C Library (glibc) has landed a set of 23 patches providing optimized AVX2 and EVEX versions of strcasecmp/strncasecmp functions while dropping support for the original AVX implementation...

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...