Phoronix

While there are many new features with Linux 5.18 with its merge window having just ended days ago, feature code is already beginning to accumulate within the various "-next" branches for what will be Linux 5.19 this summer. Patches merged today get AMD Branch Sampling (BRS) functionality in place for Zen 3 processors with that next kernel cycle...

For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems...

While in early access since last year, today Epic Games has officially announced the release of Unreal Engine 5...

AMD on Monday began shipping the Ryzen 5 5500 as a ~$159 USD processor in the Zen 3 family. The Ryzen 5 5500 offers 6 cores / 12 threads with a 65 Watt TDP rating in making for a fairly robust offering for its low price point. I've had the Ryzen 5 5500 in the lab the past few days and in this article are some initial benchmarks seeing how this mid-range processor performs.

Vulkan 1.3.211 is out today and comes with another new extension for helping implementations like Mesa's Zink for implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan...

Fwupd 1.7.7 is out this morning as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing robust BIOS/firmware updating under Linux...

Mozilla is officially shipping Firefox 99 today and the last feature release before next month's Firefox 100 milestone...

On top of other recent RADV ray-tracing improvements, there is another recently opened merge request pending that can dramatically help some Vulkan ray-tracing workloads with much better performance...

With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed...

AMD engineers on the ROCm team have released AOMP 15.0-0 on Monday as the newest version of their Radeon OpenMP compiler code. It also turns out they are working on another Radeon GPU compute compiler called "AFAR"...

Formed last year was the CentOS Hyperscale SIG for back-porting major package versions and other features back to CentOS and other interesting features for modern enterprise environments...

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases...

When it comes to system recovery on Linux, users are most often only left with a command-line for trying to recover from a failed kernel boot, borked boot loader configuration, or other show-stopping problems. With Fedora Workstation right now they have only their CLI-based Linux recovery process but are eyeing the possibility of creating a complementary GUI-based recovery environment...

GNU Compiler Collection developers are working towards the stable release of GCC 12 in the next month or so as GCC 12.1. A GCC status report was issued today and there still is just under two dozen regressions of the highest priority (P1) to address or otherwise demote those regressions to lower priority...

With Linux 5.18-rc1 released last night the merge window is now over for feature work on Linux 5.18. So as usual here is my feature overview of all the changes for Linux 5.18 that caught my eye and were interesting for this kernel that is working its way towards the stable debut by late May.

It was just two months ago AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx and now its newest data center play is entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando...

To complement their minimal install images and various stage archives produced, the Gentoo project has restarted the process to also begin producing a LiveGUI DVD/USB image as a more friendly first encounter with this Linux distribution...

Over the past month we have seen more open-source Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support build up inside Mesa 22.1 with KHR_ray_query support merged, missing stubs that at least allow Doom Eternal to get further along with its ray-tracing code path, and now there is ray primitive culling that has landed...

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller took to Twitter on Sunday with a long series of tweets of his personal opinion going after NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and encouraging the company to be more like Intel and AMD with regards to open-source driver support...

A Linux driver for the DDC/CI control protocol for modern displays (well, even many of those going back to ~2005) has been available out-of-tree while finally there has been recent work on getting this driver upstreamed into the kernel...

After LLVM moved from C++11 to allowing C++14 code within the LLVM code-base itself in 2019, LLVM developers are now preparing the transition to C++17...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc1 to cap off the two week merge window for Linux 5.18 as the next major version of the Linux kernel...

The Linux 5.18 merge window is ending today while sent in this morning were a batch of "x86/urgent" updates that include enabling the CONFIG_WERROR knob by default for Linux x86/x86_64 default configuration "defconfig" kernel builds...

Qt 6.3 is expected for release in the coming weeks and with it comes enhanced Wayland support along with the ability for developers to easily create custom shell extensions...

Coming together over the past year has been uutils as a Rust-based Coreutils implementation to replace the long-used GNU Components. Since last year Uutils has been good enough to yield a working Debian Linux system at least for the basics while out this weekend is a new version of uutils...

Building the Linux kernel with LLVM/Clang rather than GCC has continued maturing nicely since the support was mainlined two years ago and additional LLVM/Clang functionality continues to be optionally supported by the Linux kernel. With Linux 5.18 there is an improvement around the handling of the LLVM environment variable for dealing with versioned compiler binaries or compiler installations outside of the PATH...

Last week the main RISC-V pull for Linux 5.18 brought Sv57 five level page table support, improved PolarFire SoC support, an optimized MEMMOVE code, support for Restartable Sequences, and more. A second batch of RISC-V feature updates were sent out this week and now merged for making Linux 5.18 even better for this open processor ISA...

A huge milestone has been reached in the rustc_codegen_gcc effort that aims to offer a GCC-based Rust compiler alternative to the LLVM-based official Rust compiler...

As longtime Linux users likely know or even those reading Phoronix over the years, Wacom devices have generally worked well on Linux. Not that it should be particularly surprising, Wacom recently published a blog post talking up their twenty years of Linux support for their various drawing pens and tablets...

ReactOS as the open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/games/drivers has made much progress over the past two decades but in some areas still lacking like still working on SMP/multi-core support and other functionality. To some surprise, some of the older Battlefield games are at least now in a playable state on ReactOS...

Following Intel's Arc A-Series mobile graphics introduction from earlier in the week, Intel open-source engineers have released their Media Driver/SDK 22.3.1 version that includes more DG2/Alchemist feature enablement...

With March wrapped up here is a look back at the most popular open-source Linux news and articles for the month...

This week brought "an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements" and other changes to the KDE desktop stack...

There hasn't been clear guidance from Valve whether Steam Deck units will participate in the Steam Survey (I haven't seen any survey myself there either) but it's looking like possibly not as the Steam on Linux marketshare dipped lower in March...

Lutris as the open-source game manager that is popular with Linux gamers for managing titles across the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other sources. Today's Lutris 0.5.10 release brings support for the Steam Deck along with other improvements...

Last week saw the main KVM virtualization pull for the Linux 5.18 feature updates while sent in today was a second batch of improvements for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine...

Ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window ending this weekend, the driver for Microsoft's exFAT file-system saw its pull request today. There are just two patches this cycle for exFAT but both changes are significant...

AMD's GPUOpen team today announced "Orochi" as their latest open-source software offering in the HIP GPU compute space...

The GCC 12 compiler will make its stable introduction in the coming weeks. While under the final "stage 4" development of the compiler focused on regression fixes, a last minute AMD Zen 3 (znver3) tuning tweak has landed...

Last week Intel engineers released Sound Open Firmware 2.1, the newest feature update to their open-source audio DSP firmware stack that has also begun seeing some AMD support and other platforms too like NXP i.MX8...

While Jason Donenfeld is known for his splendid work on the open-source WireGuard secure network tunnel technology, lately he's been driving a number of improvements into the random/RNG code for the Linux kernel...

FreeBSD 13.1 continues working its way towards release later in April...

Linux input subsystem maintainer has sent in its batch of changes for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window...

FreeType as the widely-used, open-source library for font rendering is out with FreeType 2.12 as its first big feature release since last summer...

Here is a look back at the most-read stories on Phoronix during Q1'22 with our daily content around Linux hardware, open-source news, and lots of benchmarking...

Following this week's release of Chrome 100, Google has now published the Chrome 101 web browser beta...

In working toward the official Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" release on 21 April, today Canonical and the Ubuntu community have announced the beta release...

The Qt Company announced they will be maintaining the Qt 5.15 long-term support (LTS) code-base by an additional two years...

There still is a few days left to the Linux 5.18 merge window but already I've started firing up benchmarks of this new kernel on a handful of desktops and servers so far. One benchmark though in particular has been showing a staggering performance drop on Linux 5.18 on multiple systems but overall Linux 5.18 in my testing thus far has been working out well...

Earlier this year was news of (open)SUSE developing "D-Installer" as a new web-based distro installer. D-Installer is to complement YaST's existing Qt/CLI installer front-ends and would open up Web UI support, a better UI, and enhanced integration via the D-Bus installer service. The first public release of openSUSE with this new installer is now available for testing...