Phoronix

Mozilla has joined Google Chrome in the three digit version world with Firefox 100 being available this morning...

Already within the Linux kernel there is initial support for tiered memory servers for dealing with platforms like those with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory for being able to promote/demote pages to slower classes of memory when the speedy system RAM is under pressure. But with more tiered memory servers coming about especially with HBM classes of memory, Google and other vendors are discussing better handling of Linux's tiered memory interface...

Valve just published the updated Steam Hardware/Software Survey results for April 2022 providing a look at the Linux marketshare for April among other interesting metrics...

A new open-source tool made public by Intel engineers last month aims to help migrate codebases from using OpenACC to OpenMP. In turn the OpenMP-based offloading is preferred for Intel's XPU offloading strategy...

After last week AMD began posting the "GFX11" patches for RDNA3, today AMD published a set of patches enabling the VCN 4.0 IP block for next-generation video encode/decode capabilities...

When it comes to Intel's "i915" DRM kernel driver much of the work lately by the company's open-source engineers have been focused on DG2/Alchemist for Arc Graphics products. There has been some occasional DRM kernel driver patches mentioning their HPC work and Ponte Vecchio "PVC" preparations while sent out today was the first set of patches actually introducing Ponte Vecchio to this kernel driver...

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Linux review, here are some additional Linux benchmarks of this first AMD Ryzen CPU with 3D V-Cache.

VESA this morning announced an open standard and certification program around variable refresh rate (VRR) performance for AdaptiveSync displays for gaming and also around MediaSync for media playback performance...

Merged in Linux 5.18 is the AMD HSMP driver for enabling the "Host System Management Port" usage under Linux as an interface for enabling additional system management functionality on AMD EPYC 7003 servers. For Linux 5.19 this AMD HSMP driver is set to be extended with additional features coming with next-generation AMD EPYC servers...

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) on Sunday released version 14.0.12 as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform desktop that started out as a fork of KDE 3.5 from a decade ago and continues seeing advancements from its small but dedicated developer crew...

Intel's latest high profile hire is recruiting Brendan Gregg from Netflix...

Microsoft has joined the Open 3D Foundation that was started by the Linux Foundation when Amazon's Lumberyard game engine went on to form the Open 3D Engine. Microsoft is now backing the Open 3D Foundation and the Open 3D Engine for promoting open-source 3D game and simulation development...

Released on Sunday was GDB 12.1 as the newest version of the GNU Debugger...

While Linux 5.18 had been trending on the lighter/calmer side, Linux 5.18-rc5 was just released and it comes in "a very tiny bit larger" than usual...

Being added to the Linux kernel's driver core code is sysfs support for reporting a physical location of a device on the connected system/server. In particular for large systems and servers with many connected devices and where there may be multiple devices of the same type/model, this physical relative location reporting to user-space should make it easier to distinguish...

It was an exciting April in the open-source world from AMD continuing work on bringing up next-gen GPU and Zen 4 CPU support under Linux, some portions of NVIDIA kernel driver code being published on the Tegra side, Intel continuing DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics preparations, Mesa 22.1 nearing release, the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and much more...

The Google Hangouts Meet Speakermic is a device manufactured by ASUS that allows for 360 degree sound input/output designed for Google Hangout usage and allows daisy-chaining up to five of these speakermics together for use in large conference rooms. A Linux driver is on the way for the device just to address a mute button issue...

With GCC 12.1 due for release in roughly the next week or so, Red Hat's Marek Polacek penned a new blog post this week outlining many of the C++ language improvements to be found in this major GNU Compiler Collection update...

Building off the recent release of Genode OS 22.02 as the open-source operating system framework, Sculpt OS 22.04 was released this week as the project's effort around producing a general purpose operating system...

Sent in as a "fix" this week for the Linux 5.18 kernel and to be found in tomorrow's 5.18-rc5 release is supporting sensor readings with the Gigabyte-WMI driver for the Gigabyte B660 GAMING X DDR4 motherboard...

AMD continues working on their open-source Linux driver support for next-gen GPUs... The latest patches posted on Friday are for "GFX11", pointing to the major new graphics IP version with RDNA3 graphics processors due out later this year...

As part of Mesa preparing to drop its old GLSL to TGSI code path and routing more Mesa drivers through using the NIR intermediate representation, the Nouveau Gallium3D driver code has switched to using this modern IR by default...

Fedora Linux is looking at tightening up its cryptographic policies with next year's Fedora 38/39 releases but for Fedora 37 later this year they will likely begin warning users around the planned changes...

Loongson engineers continue working on aiming to upstream their LoongArch CPU architecture support in the Linux kernel...

KDE this week saw more components converted to using Qt Quick, among other features and improvements to the KDE Plasma desktop...

As part of my many different benchmarks being carried out due to the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release, I was curious to do a broader Linux server performance look over the past several long-term support releases of Ubuntu Linux. For making this happen I used an AMD EPYC 7601 2P as the original EPYC "Naples" server platform that can go as far back as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for software compatibility and then seeing how it has evolved with the 18.04, 20.04, and now 22.04 operating system updates.

A change merged to Mesa 22.2 on Thursday adds a Meson build option for being able to optionally control the video codecs supported by Mesa for its video encoding/decoding paths...

Redox OS 0.6 released back for Christmas 2020 while it has now finally been succeeded by Redox OS 0.7 for this Rust-written open-source operating system...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory now has their Kripke software ported to running on AMD's HIP for GPU acceleration...

Bringing back memories from the time that Fedora multi-week release delays were pretty much a given, Fedora Linux 36 has once again been delayed and now won't be out until at least 10 May...

While most of the Linux pre-loaded laptops these days ship with GNOME or a desktop derived from GNOME components, the Kubuntu Focus has been one of the most notable exceptions for using KDE Plasma and also optimized for workflows around deep learning, programming, dev ops, and more. Today the company announced the Kubuntu Focus M2 Gen4 laptop with upgraded hardware...

The GCC 12 compiler code-base has reached zero P1 regressions (the highest priority) and thus the GCC 12 compiler code has been branched from mainline, a release candidate is imminent, and if all goes well GCC 12.1.0 as the stable release could be out as soon as the end of next week...

In addition to "Fwupd Friendly Firmware" getting off the ground, this week also marks Fwupd 1.8 as the newest version of this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy system and component firmware updating on Linux and other platforms...

Last week AMD quietly launched the Radeon RX 6400 series as the new low-end RDNA2 graphics. With Radeon RX 6400 there are finally low-profile, single-slot PCIe RDNA2 graphics cards whether they be for 2U servers, mini ITX builds, or other interesting use-cases. Up for testing today is an XFX Radeon RX 6400 4GB low-profile graphics card for Linux benchmarking.

As written about earlier this week, concerns have been raised over the "new" NTFS Linux driver that it's effectively unmaintained already less than one year after being mainlined. Linus Torvalds has since commented on the matter and opens up the door for other developers to maintain it...

A few patch series were fired off yesterday for enabling new IP blocks on upcoming Radeon graphics processors...

Valve overnight released a beta of SteamOS 3.2 with some notable improvements for Steam Deck users...

One of Mesa's smaller drivers that continues advancing but not receiving as much attention as the big names is Etnaviv for providing open-source, reverse-engineered graphics support for Vivante graphics IP used across different SoCs...

Mesa 22.1 is gearing up for release in early to mid May while out today is the third weekly release candidate. Mesa 22.1-rc3 continues in back-porting many fixes and improvements from the feature code building up for next quarter's Mesa 22.2...

The Linux Foundation based Yocto Project for making it easy to create Linux-based IoT/embedded operating system software builds is out today with Yocto 4.0...

It's been a rough year for floppy disk support on Linux and goes to show the state of seldom maintained to unmaintained code...

Intel open-source engineers sent in their initial batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" updates to DRM-Next today destined for the Linux 5.19 merge window...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has launched Fwupd Friendly Firmware as a new initiative for selecting original equipment/device manufacturers to select ICs that already boast Fwupd plug-ins for easing the integration of firmware updating support under Linux...

While AMD long ago stopped actively contributing to the open-source R600 Gallium3D driver on Linux systems for OpenGL on Radeon HD 2000 "R600" through Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" graphics cards, thanks to a few open-source community developers this Mesa driver code continues seeing improvements even with the Radeon HD 6000 series already being more than one decade old. The latest on the R600g front are various efforts improving the GPU compute support...

With last week's release of the much anticipated Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Canonical announced they would begin providing a real-time kernel flavor too for this Long Term Support release though that RT kernel is initially in beta form. Today they outlined more information on their real-time kernel beta and how to actually go about trying it out...

LLVM 14.0.1 released just earlier this month while already LLVM 14.0.2 is out today. LLVM normally sees just a single point release and traditionally happened mid-to-late in the development cycle ahead of LLVM's next major release. But now LLVM is moving to shipping point releases every two weeks...

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering is out with his first blog post since last September. Today he's relaying the power of the systemd-sysext component shipped as part of systemd for loading/merging "system extension" images on the system for manipulating the exposed /usr...

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) alongside WineConf has been formally announced for this co-located event planned to happen in-person this October in Minnesota...

Chrome 101 is out today as stable for the newest feature update to Google's cross-platform web browser...

One of the Linux patch series that has been in the works for years in conjunction with Clang compiler side changes and already being responsible for exposing hundreds of kernel bugs is the KernelMemorySanitizer (KMSAN). Sent out today was the latest patch series working on the kernel infrastructure for catching uninitialized memory issues...