Phoronix

With Fedora 39 next spring it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux...

Following the July disclosure of the Retbleed CPU security vulnerability affecting older processors and an AMD change made in August, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Retbleed mitigations on Linux, including if opting for the IBPB-based Retbleed mitigation, and the accumulated CPU security mitigation impact for Zen 2 with the flagship Ryzen 9 3950X processor.

GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual...

LLVM 15 is now ready to roll as a big half-year update to this open-source compiler stack. LLVM 15.0, Clang 15.0, and other sub-projects have a lot to show for their summer 2022 accomplishments...

DRM-Misc manager Maarten Lankhorst with Intel's open-source graphics engineering team has submitted the latest weekly pull of new feature code to queue in DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.1 merge window...

Last month saw the Cemu project go open-source and introduce Linux support with Cemu 2.0 for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that has been in development for years. Cemu 2.0-1 is now available with Linux improvements...

OpenWrt as the embedded Linux distribution designed to run on wireless routers and other networking devices is out with its 22.03 stable release...

Mesa recently landed BPTC software fallback handling that is a requirement for OpenGL 4.2 support but BPTC is not natively supported by all GPU hardware, particularly on the embedded side. That software emulation support for BPTC is similar to what already has existed within Mesa for the ASTC and ETC formats too. A merge request is pending that also adds S3TC software fallback handling, which helps out some of the smaller, embedded GPU drivers too for getting more games running that are dependent on S3 Texture Compression...

After a series of alpha and beta releases over the past several months, out this past week is the first release candidate of the upcoming PHP 8.2...

Being merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.3 is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently ratified mesh shader extension...

While there has been talk and plans for Vulkan API support within Blender, currently there are no active developers working on it and much work remains before it would be ready for end-users...

A new patch floated by a Google Chrome OS / Linux kernel engineer would enable support for the Intel-led Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) by default as part of the standard kernel configuration for this security feature...

Originally carried as a patch against Ubuntu 22.04 for its GNOME 42 desktop and continued to be maintained against GNOME 43 for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 is supporting dynamic triple buffering with the Mutter compositor. This has allowed Ubuntu's GNOME desktop environment to perform better for some systems albeit not upstream in GNOME...

Following the OpenMandriva Lx ROME Technical Preview release from earlier this summer, a "silver candidate" for OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 ROME is now available for testing...

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.0 in time for some US Labor Day holiday weekend testing...

A change queued up as part of the "x86/mm" TIP changes expected to land for Linux 6.1 will now have the default kernel configuration warn at kernel boot time around any W+X mappings that pose a security risk...

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter updates ahead of this month's GNOME 43 desktop debut...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for compatibility with GPUOpen's Radeon Raytracing Analyzer...

KDE's Kaidan app has been in development for a number of years now as a Jabber/XMPP chat client built around Kirigami and Qt Quick. Kaidan has been under active development and formally became a KDE project in 2019. It's newest ambition is now working out encrypted audio and video calls...

GravityMark 1.70 has been released as the multi-API graphics benchmark developed by Tellusim Technologies that was started by former Unigine engine CTO and co-founder Alexander Zapryagaev...

Currently when it comes to shipping new/updated device support for firmware updating under Linux with FWUPD/LVFS, it requires making/adjusting a Fwupd plug-in for carrying out the actual firmware copying/updating of the device and then adding in the device VID/PID to a quirks table so Fwupd knows about what to match a given device to for the firmware plug-in to use. Even in new devices where no plug-in changes are required, new device entries are still needed in the quirks table and it makes it challenging when Linux distributions don't quickly move to new FWUPD releases. Moving forward a better solution is being explored...

There is a lot of last minute feature work and improvements heading into Plasma 5.26 ahead of its upcoming beta and feature freeze...

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin...

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel...

PipeWire 0.3.57 was released on Friday as the newest update to this Linux audio/video streams management solution that aims to fill the functionality currently provided by the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

The sdl12-compat is a SDL 1.2 compatibility layer implementation atop SDL 2.0. This sdl12-compat project allows for old, out-of-date games and other applications relying on the old SDL 1.2 interface to in turn run via the modern SDL2 library for better compatibility with input devices, Wayland support (assuming no direct X11 hard dependencies), support for PipeWire audio, improved input controls, and various other enhancements only found in SDL 2.0 and not the unmaintained SDL 1.2...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension...

Back in July Intel's Peter Zijlstra proposed "Call Depth Tracking" as a mitigation approach for handling Retbleed and avoiding the "performance horror show" of Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) usage. Out today is the newest version of the Call Depth Tracking code and the performance benchmark results are looking very promising for lessening the pain of the Retbleed CPU mitigation performance impact...

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus...

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel...

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days...

Stemming from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS activating systemd's out-of-memory daemon (systemd-oomd) and users finding their web browser being killed when facing memory or swap pressure, a change has been upstreamed in systemd to help alleviate this situation...

An independent contributor to the open-source Mesa 3D graphics project has begun eyeing AVX-512 support by the LLVMpipe software rasterizer due to AVX-512 being present with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors...

When currently using Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with their new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, it's simply been reported as "Intel{R} Graphics" for the product/renderer string. With the latest Mesa 22.3-devel work and for back-porting to the current stable series, the graphics card models are beginning to be properly reported...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2022 that show a slight increase to Linux gaming as part of the overall marketshare on a percentage basis...

For those planning to stick to the Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Long-Term Support series still for some time before moving to the newer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is available today as the newest point release in that older series...

Earlier this year AMD's GPUOpen team announced the Orochi project for dynamic HIP/CUDA run-time handling. Orochi makes it easier for application developers to ship AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA support within a single code-base / binary that is then selected at run-time based on the GPU in use...

Vulkan 1.3.226 is out this morning and to much excitement adds the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension as cross-vendor functionality for mesh shaders!..

With the Apple M2 running Asahi Linux you may be wondering whether it's better to use the GCC compiler as is the default on upstream Arch Linux or whether going for LLVM Clang will yield better performance given all the LLVM/Clang usage by AArch64 vendors, including Apple's own Xcode compiler toolchain making use of it. If you are wondering about GCC vs. Clang for building binaries on the Apple M2, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite...

Inspired by Microsoft's compiler toolchain having a "std:c++latest" option for automatically targeting the latest supported C++ spec, GCC compiler developers have been discussing the possibility of a similar feature with the ability to specify -std=c++current for the current C++ standard or -std=c++future for the future/draft specification...

One of the interesting capabilities with Thunderbolt and now USB4 that is seemingly not too widely used is for networking between systems. The Linux kernel for the past half-decade already has offered a Thunderbolt networking driver for networking between hosts with Thunderbolt cables. The latest improvement on this front is now supporting USB4's end-to-end flow control mode...

For the open-source software popular for screen-casting and videogame live-streaming, OBS Studio 28.0 was released today as a big feature update...

During the month of August on Phoronix there were 260 original news stories and Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux / open-source readers the most this month...

Genode OS as the open-source operating system framework based on a micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components is out with its newest feature release. A big focus this cycle has been on making Genode OS more practical as a smartphone operating system...

For those running the embedded OpenWrt Linux operating system for routers and other networking devices or just running a memory-constrained MIPS Linux system, the forthcoming Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" kernel feature is looking very good on that front...

QEMU 7.1 is now available as the latest feature release for this processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

While Apache OpenOffice development is rather stagnant, many of the original OpenOffice.org developers left for LibreOffice long ago, and LibreOffice has been delivering far more modern features and functionality, people continue to download OpenOffice. This week the Apache Software Foundation is celebrating more than 333 million downloads of their open-source office suite...

Earlier this month Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS was delayed by one week due to an OEM install bug leading to broken Snaps support. Now with Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS the Canonical developers are racing down to a last-minute rebuild of images over a NVIDIA proprietary driver issue...

A new release of Archinstall, an easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer, is on the way...