Phoronix

Genode OS continues to be developed as an innovative open-source operating system framework. Genode developers closed out February by issuing the Genode OS Framework 22.02 release with many new features and improvements...

While Intel's DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics card support with the open-source Linux driver stack appears to be getting into shape with the latest upstream code ahead of the graphics cards expected to ship next quarter, the Xe HP compute accelerator support remains very much a work-in-progress for the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver...

During the course of February on Phoronix were 236 original news articles covering the state of open-source affairs and Linux performance. While the pandemic seems to be lightening up, sadly the ad industry is still in a downward state, but in any event here is a look at the most popular Phoronix content for the past month...

Smartmontools 7.3 was released as the first update to this open-source package in more than one year for providing a utility (smartctl) and daemon (smartd) for monitoring the SMART capabilities built into modern (S)ATA / NVMe / SCSI / SAS disk drives...

Wasmer 2.2 was released on Monday for this WebAssembly (WASM) run-time that aims to "run any code on any client" with this open-source stack working across operating systems / platforms and supporting a variety of programming languages...

Dav1d as the leading CPU-based, open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN project is nearing its v1.0 release...

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree were updated AMD firmware images for Picasso, Raven, and Raven2 hardware with a rather important fix...

Vodafone in collaboration with Canonical is showing a prototype "Cloud Smartphone" as Mobile World Congress happening this week in Barcelona...

Earlier this month I noted a Linux scheduler change queued into sched/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 cycle that is expected to help AMD EPYC processors and other select Zen processors in various workloads. The change has been in the works for several months and is about adjusting the allowed NUMA imbalance when spanning multiple LLCs. I've now carried out some of my own benchmarks on EPYC hardware and indeed is further ratcheting up the Linux kernel performance.

It's been four years since the release of Dbus 1.12 (and even 20 months since the last point release [v1.12.20] up until this week when v1.12.22 was tagged) while today Dbus 1.14.0 is being introduced for this user-space IPC solution for Linux systems...

It looks like for the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle coming up it could begin allowing modern C11 code to be accepted rather than the current Linux kernel codebase being limited to the C89 standard...

Linux Mint Debian Edition "LMDE" continues to be developed in the event that Linux Mint itself which is based on Ubuntu would have to shift its base over to upstream Debian. Out today is LMDE 5 Beta...

Last week a new version of Intel's IWD open-source wireless daemon was published with a few improvements and new features for this increasingly used alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems...

Intel's Linux enablement work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) continues for better securing virtual machines on future Intel hardware platforms...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc6 to cap off the week that he describes as "nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombieapocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much."..

As noted last week there were Linux developers discussing the idea of removing the ReiserFS file-system given that it hasn't been really relevant in more than a decade and is very unlikely to be used still in production use-cases with modern kernels. It looks like the deprecation will move forward but the actual removal from the mainline kernel won't happen until 2025...

While free software developer Con Kolivas is known for his work on the Linux kernel to improve desktop responsiveness and efforts like BFS and MuQSS, there is also user-space software he has developed. One of those user-space programs under is belt is LRZIP, the Long Range ZIP format, that is focused on providing speedy compression of large files and to do so with lower amounts of memory...

Coreboot 4.16 is out this weekend as the newest quarterly release for this project striving for open-source system firmware / BIOS replacements...

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends...

According to the Coreboot camp, future Intel systems with FSP 3.0 and Universal Scalable Firmware (USF) will be even less friendly for open-source system firmware...

Already for the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle on the AMDGPU driver side has been preparations for new hardware blocks presumably coming with RDNA3 GPUs, FreeSync Video Mode by default, and other changes. As likely the last "feature" pull of AMDGPU material for Linux 5.18, another pull request to DRM-Next was submitted on Friday...

NVIDIA's Orin SoC with twelve Cortex-A78AE CPU cores and Ampere graphics should be quite a strong offering when it's more broadly available later this year. This "Tegra234" SoC has been seeing work on enabling it with the mainline Linux kernel and the latest fruit of that work is a new HDA audio driver set for introduction with Linux 5.18...

China's Loongson has posted their latest set of patches for enabling their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture for the Linux kernel...

KDE developers are surely celebrating this weekend now that Valve's Steam Deck is shipping and KDE Plasma is the default desktop in the "developer mode". But in any event it's been another busy week for KDE developers with fixes and improvements to their open-source desktop stack...

Wine 7.3 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for enjoying Windows games and applications running on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Following last summer's release of Firewalld 1.0, out today is Firewalld 1.1 as the next major update to this Linux firewall daemon...

Over the past nearly 18 years of running Phoronix, I have come across many interesting Linux-based products from Linux embedded in motherboards for instant-on use to the BlackDog USB port pen drive Linux servers to solar-powered super-computers in trash cans. The most fun and promising Linux-powered gaming device for the masses though is launching today: Valve's Steam Deck. I've been fortunate to be testing out this Arch Linux derived handheld game console the past month and it has been working out very well -- both as a portable Steam gaming device but making it even more compelling from the Linux enthusiast angle is its "developer mode" that effectively turns it into a general Linux handheld and also being free to load your own Linux distribution of choice.

Fwupd 1.7.6 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for facilitating system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

The AMD HSMP kernel driver is currently under review for possible inclusion into the Linux 5.18 cycle. HSMP in this context is the Host System Management Port...

We are now one step closer to the long overdue GIMP 3.0 release as the GTK3, much improved version of this open-source alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...

It was just with Linux 5.17 that its RISC-V code adds "sv48" support for being able to handle more system memory by offering 48-bit virtual address space support. Now for Linux 5.17 there is "sv57" support prepared for 57-bit virtual address space support with five level page table handling...

The Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite immutable OS spins of Fedora Linux are looking at mounting /sysroot read-only by default for where the operating system assets are stored...

Intel on Wednesday sent in another batch of i915 kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.18 merge window...

In addition to performance improvements for Linux's RNG code, Jason Donenfeld has also been working on security improvements around the kernel's random number generator code in the context of virtual machines. New patches he has been working on aim to address the issue of potentially having the same stream of random numbers when forking/cloning a VM...

Canonical this afternoon published Ubuntu 20.04.4 as the newest point release to their current Long Term Support (LTS) series...

Last month Intel released SVT-AV1 0.9 as a big step-up for this open-source AV1 encoder with delivering even better performance and also adding new preset options for much higher performance capabilities. Out today is SVT-AV1 0.9.1 with some incremental improvements over the January version...

NetworkManager 1.36 is now available for this widely-used software for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections...

Canonical this morning released Mir 2.7 as the newest version of its display stack that is centered around easing Wayland usage for various use-cases...

While NZXT is known for their computer cases, water cooling systems, and other peripherals for gamers, it appears they are ramping up their gaming software ambitions as well...

Google engineers have posted a big patch series for Linux as they work on a new Address Space Isolation implementation for KVM to help mitigate various types of speculative execution attacks...

Qualcomm by way of their QuiC innovation center have been developing Gunyah as an open-source type-1 hypervisor. Posted on Wednesday were the initial patches providing Linux driver support for Gunyah...

The MythTV open-source digital video recorder (DVR) software isn't nearly as popular as it was a decade ago considering all of the Internet streaming services these days, but the developers behind it continue pushing forward this open-source DVR solution. Out today is MythTV 32.0 as the first major release in nearly two years...

In addition to the big AMDGPU updates and equally significant changes to the Intel DRM driver, various other Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display drivers saw updates intended for Linux 5.18 submitted on Wednesday by way of DRM-Misc-Next...

For those relying upon the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack and continuing to use an X.Org Server rather than Wayland and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver, xf86-video-amdgpu 22.0 is out today to improve the X.Org experience for Radeon graphics...

Landing in Mesa 22.1-devel today for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver is a fix allowing more modern Windows games running under Steam Play (Proton) to now render correctly with the Intel graphics...

Intel has a very exciting acquisition to announce this morning - not another hardware company, but they have acquired Linutronix to ramp up their investment in Linux/open-source engineering...

With GCC 12 now onto stage four meaning that the major feature work is over, I've slowly begun running more tests on the GCC 12 compiler that is due for its stable introduction around April. First up is a look at the Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" performance on GCC 12 in its near-final form compared to GCC 11.2 as the current stable release from last year.

Arch Linux has re-elected its current project leader...

Intel's open-source Linux engineers have been working a lot recently on the kernel's support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). Intel TDX has similarities to AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and is ultimately about better protecting virtual machines. The latest patch series published for Linux is the Intel TDX Guest Attestation support for being able to verify a TDX VM's trustworthiness via a third-party server...

LibreOffice has already provided some support for Microsoft SmartArt Graphics while now they are working on more advanced diagram support for this open-source office suite...