Phoronix

Btrfs file-system developers remain very busy on multiple fronts from performance and reliability enhancements to in-development Btrfs on-disk format changes. A notable item now on deck for integration in Linux 5.18 is Btrfs support for encoded I/O...

Back in November when Intel's 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors first launched I ran benchmarks across operating systems and found Windows 11 delivering better performance than Linux with the Core i9 12900K flagship processor. Fortunately, thanks to kernel improvements since Linux 5.16, that is largely no longer the case. Here is a fresh look at the i9-12900K performance under Ubuntu 22.04 daily with Linux 5.16 and 5.17-rc3 kernels tested as well and Clear Linux for Intel's very own reference Linux platform.

AMD just announced that it has received approval from all necessary regulators to proceed with its acquisition of Xilinx...

Linux 5.18 is looking to be another very busy kernel cycle for Intel as in addition to Alder Lake N graphics, the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI), and integrating Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), Intel's PECI kernel code is finally being mainlined...

Overnight AMD quietly released ROCm 5.0 for improving the Radeon Open eCosystem. Most exciting with ROCm 5.0 is having some level of Navi 2x / RDNA2 GPU support!..

Hitting the LLVM 15.0 development tree this morning are the initial patches for China's LoongArch CPU architecture...

The Radeon Software for Linux packaged enterprise driver is preparing for its Q1'2022 update...

DirectFB2 is in development with work on it having started last year after the original DirectFB project ceased development a half-decade ago. While more embedded/mobile platforms have moved on from DirectFB and now targeting Wayland, DirectFB2 hopes to restore its viability for embedded systems...

One of the recurring FOSDEM talks we have come to enjoy has been Oracle's Daniel Kiper providing an annual update on the GRUB bootloader development efforts. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2022 was the latest on this leading open-source bootloader with recent accomplishments and plans for this year...

We still don't know what features Intel is planning to capitalize upon with their Software Defined Silicon "SDSi" functionality in future CPUs, but it turns out the kernel mainlining of the necessary software support is now expanded to land with Linux 5.18. With the SDSi kernel support coming together rather quickly, it's possible we could be seeing Software Defined Silicon rather soon...

Along with yesterday marking the release of KDE Plasma 5.24, KWinFT 5.24 debuted as the newest version of this KWin compositor fork that continues focusing on providing Wayland support, new features, and modernizing the codebase...

GNU Binutils 2.38 is out today as the newest feature release to this collection of free software utilities very common to Linux systems and other platforms...

Intel on Tuesday submitted to DRM-Next what is likely to be their biggest set of feature updates for their "i915" kernel graphics driver in this spring's Linux 5.18...

The LUMI supercomputer in Finland is still being assembled with its 2,560 nodes consisting of a 64-core AMD Trento CPU and four AMD Instinct MI250X GPU accelerators per node. This 375+ PFLOPs was supposed to come online by the end of 2021 but was challenged by the supply chain crisis and is now aiming for general availability by the middle of the year. While the hardware is still coming together, their HPC engineers have been hard at work optimizing the open-source Linux software stack...

The Intel Crocus Mesa driver providing open-source Gallium3D support for older i965 through Haswell era graphics hardware now offers much better OpenGL compatibility profile support...

Last year I wrote about Alibaba wanting to contribute AVX-optimized SM3 hashing for the Linux kernel to speed up that Chinese hashing algorithm that has use-cases similar to that of SHA256 while having similar security and performance. That work is now queued up into the crypto subsystem's "-next" branch for Linux 5.18...

At this past weekend's FOSDEM 2022 virtual event, a status update was provided on Mesa's "TURNIP" Vulkan open-source driver that provides accelerated support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics...

As part of Intel making a number of security disclosures public today, Intel has published updated CPU microcode images for Linux users via their GitHub repository...

Linux 5.16 brought improvements/fixes for Alder Lake S to help the likes of the Core i9 12900K deliver better performance. With the in-development Linux 5.17, the i9-12900K is looking even better. And then on the horizon for Linux 5.18 is the possibility of even better performance thanks to Intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI/EHFI) positioned to land...

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry...

Ahead of upcoming Intel Arc graphics cards shipping with ray-tracing capabilities, Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has landed its VK_KHR_ray_query support...

KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release...

While so many Linux distributions these days are just cosmetic changes and basic package alterations atop the likes of Ubuntu / Debian and Fedora, Chimera Linux that started last year continues to be an interesting project to watch for using the Linux kernel but with the FreeBSD user-space, making use of the LLVM Clang compiler rather than GCC, using musl as its preferred C library, and other differences...

Intel's open-source engineers have already begun preparing Linux kernel patches around 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) support that will be known as WiFi 7...

One of the developers involved in the initiative of porting the Linux kernel and open-source software to Nintendo's Wii U game console has brought up the possibility of getting the kernel changes mainlined into the Linux kernel. While Linux on the Wii U may sound exciting - especially for those having the aging console otherwise collecting dust - but the Linux support falls short for now and it would be a lengthy process to get the code cleaned up and properly upstreamed...

Yesterday I published an article looking at the unfortunate state of Arch Linux's GNU compiler toolchain that it's fallen behind and users raising concerns over it for months. Following that article the current Arch Linux GNU toolchain package maintainer has provided an update and is calling for at least another package maintainer to get involved...

The "hid-sigmamicro" driver is queued up in HID-next ahead of Linux 5.18 for dealing with keyboards exhibiting problematic behavior that use SiGma Micro keyboard control ICs...

With Linux 5.17 are some nice networking performance optimizations touching different areas while the never-ending optimization work will continue with Linux 5.18...

Fwupd 1.7.5 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source solution for updating system and component firmware under Linux that is easily distributed by the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

Intel Foundry Services already courted SiFive as a customer and there were even those talks last year of Intel reportedly trying to acquire that leading RISC-V chip designer while today Intel has announced it joined RISC-V International as its latest move around this open-source processor ISA...

Last week marked the long awaited release of a 64-bit spin of Raspberry Pi OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has now made available a 64-bit build of their default Linux OS build derived from Debian for all recent Raspberry Pi hardware supporting AArch64. For those curious, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance improvement by switching from Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to 64-bit.

After establishing a new organization within AMD last year focused on improving AMD client platforms on Linux, they are now hiring again for this endeavor...

With the Linux 5.18 kernel coming later this year, the Intel Protected Processor Inventory Number (PPIN) will be more easily exposed for their server processors...

While Arch Linux is known to be at the forefront of rolling-release Linux distributions, when it comes to its compiler toolchain the packages have fallen behind over the past year...

While much of the Intel DG2/Alchemist open-source driver support has already been upstreamed into the Linux kernel, Mesa for OpenGL and Vulkan, and related components like IGC and Compute-Runtime, there are various bits still pending ahead of the Intel Arc graphics cards set to make their debut in the next few months. One of those pieces still working their way upstream is enabling the GSC block, the Graphics System Controller...

OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 was released this FOSDEM weekend for this distribution derived from the once great Mandriva Linux, formerly Mandrake...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc3 as the latest test kernel for Linux 5.17 that should be out as stable before the end of March...

The Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is adding support for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI, also talked about sometimes as the Enhanced Hardware Feedback interface - EHFI)...

While the Apple M1 SoC is a great piece of hardware, a large part of what has made Apple Silicon so successful with their newest Macs has been their Rosetta 2 software for dynamically translating x86/x86_64 software to run well on these 64-bit Arm systems. Existing applications and games optimized for prior Intel Macs continue running generally in excellent shape on their newest hardware thanks to Rosetta 2. While there is the ongoing Linux bring-up work for Apple Silicon on Linux, the open-source world doesn't currently have that advantage of a compelling Rosetta 2 alternative but the FEX-Emu project hopes to change that outlook...

A Linux kernel driver was posted today for platform control support for Valve's upcoming Steam Deck...

While Linux 5.17 is introducing the ASUS WMI EC Sensors driver for greatly expanding Linux's support for hardware sensor coverage on newer ASUS desktop motherboards, already with Linux 5.18 that driver will be deprecated to make way for a new ASUS EC sensor driver replacement...

Besides all of the Linux-focused talks at the annual FOSDEM conference, another favorite track of mine is that on micro-kernels and other operating systems. While there wasn't the GNU/Hurd status update in 2022 as there has been in some recent years, there was a talk over GNU/Hurd using NetBSD kernel drivers in order to expand its hardware coverage...

For use with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Oracle this week released Oracle Linux 8.5 onto the Microsoft Store...

There's been some activity on AMD open-source firmware support for newer hardware platforms but for those wanting a fully open-source firmware stack, there remains work on older generations of AMD server platforms. Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented today at FOSDEM 2022 as to the current state AMD open-source firmware efforts around Coreboot...

Microsoft continues work on their controversial "DXGKRNL" driver they hope to mainline into the Linux kernel for benefiting their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) efforts...

Ahead of the Steam Deck shipping later this month, here is where the Steam on Linux marketshare currently stands...

KDE continues seeing a lot of Wayland fixes landing as well as general crash fixes and addressing other glitches with this popular desktop environment...

As a particularly important move for Linux gamers and enthusiasts where you may be riding frequent Git builds of new Mesa graphics drivers or even the bi-weekly point releases - compared to the multi-week/monthly update regiment for Windows graphics drivers - Valve's Steam client will now flush its stale shader cache upon GPU/driver changes. This is important for conserving disk space especially where storage constraints are possible like with the Steam Deck...

While it's not the same as sitting in Brussels and enjoying some Belgian beers while socializing in-person with developers, the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is happening this weekend online...

In a short period of time Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D driver has gone from implementing OpenGL 3.3 atop the Direct3D 12 interface to now having working OpenGL 4.2 support...