Phoronix

In early 2021 the Vulkan Video extensions were published in beta/provisional form as a new industry-standard video encode/decode API with the context of Vulkan. As a nice Christmas gift this week from The Khronos Group, the extensions have been finalized as Vulkan Video 1.0 and are now deemed ready for production use...

The IBM Power/PowerPC architecture updates were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window and most significant with this update is the introduction of a new Power-specific qspinlock implementation designed to bolster large system scalability...

AMD kicked off Christmas week by posting an eighth version of their P-State EPP driver patches for implementing the AMD Energy Performance Preference handling within their recent processors/SoCs for software to hint a performance or energy efficiency hint. P-State EPP can address some of the shortcomings with AMD's original P-State driver implementation merged nearly a year ago and has been showing good results in numbers posted by AMD engineers...

A new set of patches posted for the Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing protocol code inside the Linux kernel can deliver roughly 10x better performance for file transfers...

For years XFS has been working toward online repair capabilities for the file-system and it looks like in 2023 that work may finally come to fruition...

Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end...

In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler...

Introduced nearly two years ago with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for many innovative use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. With the Linux 6.2 kernel, SquashFS is the latest file-system adding support for IDMAPPED mounts...

Introduced at the start of the year was an experimental open-source project implementing the VA-API interface over NVIDIA's NVDEC video decoding API. In turn this VA-API support for running atop NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver allows for GPU video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting the Video Acceleration API. Now in closing out the year is a new NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver release...

Merged back in Linux 5.13 last year was Landlock for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock allows restricting ambient rights for a set of processes and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM) for establishing safe security sandboxes. With Linux 6.2 file truncation support is added for Landlock...

In addition to the HID driver updates for the Linux 6.2 kernel that were merged this week, the input subsystem updates also landed this week and were headlined by having several new touchscreen drivers...

The RISC-V processor architecture changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.2 cycle...

While Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" will hopefully be out around mid-2023, Debian 11.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to the current Debian 11 "Bullseye" stable series...

After years of work the Apache project SpamAssassin has released its much-improved SpamAssassin 4.0 open-source software...

As of today the LLVM Git compiler finally has initial support for AMD Zen 4 CPUs with the -march=znver4 option now wired up for Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors...

Linus Torvalds can be known for his hardware commentary at times like hoping AVX-512 "dies a painful death", Intel's "bad policies" around ECC memory, and giving NVIDIA the finger. The latest colorful commentary by the Linux creator is around Intel's new Linear Address Masking (LAM) feature that aimed to land in Linux 6.2 but is now delayed until the code can be reworked...

After recently getting H.264 and H.265 video decode working for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver with the current Vulkan Video extensions, David Airlie of Red Hat resumed his prior work on enabling the Vulkan Video extensions for the open-source Intel "ANV" driver too...

As written about last month, Sony has been working on adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer PlayStation HID driver in Linux. The DualShock 4 controller has long been supported under the older "hid-sony" driver but now with Linux 6.2 the support can also be found under "hid-playstation"...

As a wonderful Christmas gift to KDE Plasma users on Wayland, fractional scaling under Wayland has been successfully merged...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window...

Introduced in early 2021 with now prior-generation AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. While this year saw the initial SEV-SNP support was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel, the hypervisor portion remain outstanding and have taken a step back as the AMD engineers overhauled their implementation...

With the Linux 6.2 kernel the NFSD code is taking another step closer to removing the older NFSv2 support...

Ahead of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable, Xeon CPU Max, and Intel Data Center GPUs shipping, Intel today announced the oneAPI 2023 tools release...

Last month when AMD launched the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series they also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler derived from LLVM/Clang and tailored to their latest Zen microarchitecture. At the time I ran some AOCC 4.0 benchmarks on the Ryzen 7000 series and compared it to GCC and Clang. Since then I've had the time on my Genoa test rig to look at how well AOCC 4.0 is performing and in this article are some benchmarks with the EPYC 9374F processors between GCC and AOCC 4.0.

The KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop, which is to be the last Plasma 5 feature release before Plasma 6.0, is poised to introduce revamped multi-monitor handling...

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests...

The x86/microcode changes that were merged this week into the Linux 6.2 kernel address prior shortcomings with the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver so it's now deemed ready to help in spotting out faulty silicon across a fleet of systems in production or prior to commissioning new hardware...

Ampere Computing is the latest major vendor now backing the Cloud Hypervisor Project hosted by the Linux Foundation as a Rust-written VMM focused on running modern cloud workloads in a fast and secure manner...

The FUSE kernel code for supporting "File-Systems In User-Space" has ready several updates for Linux 6.2 including some performance optimizations...

The initial batch of feature updates for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) have been submitted for the Linux 6.2 merge window...

For those relying on Microsoft's exFAT file-system for your SD cards or USB flash drives, the kernel driver with Linux 6.2 is capable of handling much faster file and directory creation than on prior versions...

AMD today capped off their busy week by releasing ROCm 5.4.1 as the newest version of their open-source compute stack...

VKD3D-Proton 2.8 has been released as a nice Christmas gift to Linux gamers for advancing this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is transitioning to x86-64-v2 CPU requirements and for the x86 32-bit realm they are working to carve-out their i586 packages into a separate "openSUSE:Factory:LegacyX86" archive. But so far no one has stepped up to maintain these 32-bit packages and thus jeopardizing its future...

There's a fair amount going on in the power management space for both Intel x86_64 and Arm hardware with the Linux 6.2 kernel...

Earlier this week was the initial Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX Linux review focusing on the gaming performance while in today's article is a look at the Radeon RX 7900 series when running on Blender 3.4 with its Cycles HIP back-end as well as various OpenCL compute benchmarks against the older Radeon graphics cards and NVIDIA GeForce competition.

AMD today published the AMDVLK 2022.Q4.4 open-source Vulkan driver that provides Navi 31 GPU support for this week's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX graphics cards...

Interest and support around Vulkan Video for adding GPU-accelerated video encode/decode to the Vulkan API has been (sadly) rather slow. But at least the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen some new work around enabling H.264 and H.265 video decoding over Vulkan Video...

After nearly two years of development the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment was released today with a wide assortment of improvements...

The QEMU open-source emulator that plays an important role in the Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 7.2 release ahead of the Christmas holidays...

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture improvements have landed in the Linux 6.2 kernel...

It was just earlier this month that the LibreOffice 7.5 Alpha was released and today it's been succeeded by the LibreOffice 7.5 Beta after landing more than one hundred fixes and more than 350 new commits...

Jaegeuk Kim has ushered in the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel, which is headlined by two new features for this file-system...

For those that prefer waiting for the first Mesa point release in a new series before moving to it, Mesa 22.3 is now on the table with Mesa 22.3.1 having been released on Wednesday...

After a half-year of development, Libreboot 20221214 is now available for this downstream of Coreboot that is focused on software freedom and providing fully open-source firmware support. Libreboot also enhances the experience with an automated build system and other changes in the name of software freedom and being user-friendly...

Yesterday it was the GCC Rust front-end "gccrs" being merged into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for GCC 13. Today the Modula-2 language front-end also made it over the finish line...

As we approach the end of 2022 and with Intel recently having revealed a January date for introducing Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids", here is a look at how the upstream Linux performance has evolved since the debut of the current-generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors debuted in early 2021. This article is looking at the Xeon Platinum 8380 Linux performance with benchmarks conducted on CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu back when Ice Lake SP first debuted against now on the latest Linux OS releases.

Flang as LLVM's Fortran language front-end has landed support for the -Ofast and -ffast-math compiler flags...

In addition to the in-development Linux 6.2 bringing TDX guest attestation support for use with new processors, another new hardware security feature being enabled with this next kernel release is Asynchronous Exit Notification for Software Guard Extensions (SGX)...

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the AMD Device Library eXtra "ADLX" software development kit intended to help improve integration with third-party software. While nice in theory, for now at least it's Windows-only...