Phoronix

During the month of June the Steam on Linux usage hit a multi-year high point of 1.18% while for July there is another tick upwards thanks to the continued interest in Linux gaming around the Steam Deck...

DECnet as a set of networking protocols from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that date back to 1975 are expected to be finally removed from the Linux kernel. The DECnet protocols have long been obsolete, the Linux kernel implementation has been orphaned for more than one decade, and is code that belongs more in a history museum than the mainline kernel...

IO_uring continues to be one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent years and with the in-development Linux 6.0 kernel is getting even better along with some nice block updates and other storage-related enhancements...

Ingo Molnar today submitted the main set of kernel scheduler updates for the in-development Linux 6.0 (nee 5.20). The scheduler updates contain some notable changes that will be interesting to benchmark in the days ahead...

Sven Peter who has worked a lot on various aspects of Apple Silicon enablement for Linux today posted the patches enabling Apple Bluetooth driver support for Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware and also for some Apple x86 Macs...

Among the early pull requests for the now-open Linux 6.0 merge window (nee Linux 5.20) are a few AMD additions worth mentioning...

Merged in early July to Mesa 22.2 was the rewritten R600g NIR back-end for improving older AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards on Linux with this open-source OpenGL driver. That NIR code was limited to "newer" Radeon GPUs supported by the R600g driver while now it's been extended for supporting pre-Evergreen GPUs too...

Released on Sunday was Unvanquished 0.53 Beta as the latest in a long string of betas for this one of the most promising open-source first person shooter (FPS) games...

In addition to being busy leading WireGuard, Jason Donenfeld continues working heavily on the Linux kernel's random number generator (RNG) code. For Linux 6.0, a number of RNG improvements are ready...

Following yesterday's release of Linux 5.19 stable the FSFLA folks maintaining the GNU Linux-libre kernel released their downstream version that strips out support for loading proprietary kernel modules as well as stripping out drivers/support that requires non-free/closed-source microcode/firmware files...

In case you missed it in yesterday's Linux 5.19 announcement and to avoid reader questions/confusion in the days ahead, just making it loud and clear here: what was referred to as the Linux 5.20 kernel in development will most likely be called Linux 6.0...

July was another exciting month for Linux and open-source software fans from being the first to report on the news of systemd creator Lennart Poettering joining Microsoft, Linux 5.19 getting wrapped up, popularity of the Rust programming language continues to climb, lots of open-source graphics driver news, and much more...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19 as stable for the newest version of the Linux kernel. He also mentioned this is the first time he released the new Linux kernel from an ARM64 laptop in the form of an Apple MacBook running an AArch64 Apple M2 SoC...

OpenRazer as the independent open-source project providing Linux drivers and user-space daemon for Razer peripherals is out with its newest feature release...

At DebConf22 in Kosovo that recently wrapped up, Lenovo's Mark Pearson who leads the company's Linux initiatives talked in-person about their 2022 platform support for Linux and their progress over the past year. In 2022 they expect 30+ platforms with Linux support...

Ahead of the Linux 5.19 stable kernel being launched later today, a few pull requests have already begun queuing for the Linux 5.20 merge window. Among those early pulls are the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates...

You may recall a month ago the lone developer still working on open-source VIA x86 graphics support for Linux hoped to finally mainline this "OpenChrome" DRM/KMS driver for the Linux 5.20 cycle. Well, Linux 5.19 is being released today and that opens up the Linux 5.20 merge window but still the OpenChrome DRM driver isn't ready to go yet...

Linux Mint 21 has been officially released as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu...

Submitted early ahead of tomorrow's Linux 5.19 stable kernel release are the SoC changes destined for the Linux 5.20 merge window. There are more than one thousand SoC patches for Linux 5.20 cycle adding and updating many SoCs and board/platform coverage. One of several notable additions this cycle is introducing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 support for high-end Arm laptops...

Wasmer's goal is to be "the universal WebAssembly runtime" with aiming to "run any code on any client" and with Wasmer 3.0 they are furthering the potential for this multi-language, multi-platform WASM stack...

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64) architecture updates have already been sent in for Linux 5.20 ahead of the merge window formally opening...

The first release candidate of LLVM 15.0 is now available for testing of this growing open-source compiler stack...

Introduced last year in Linux 5.15 was the Aquacomputer driver that started off as a hardware monitoring "HWMON" sensor driver supporting Aquacomputer's D5 Next water-cooling pump. In Linux 5.19 that driver was extended to support the Aquacomputer OCTO fan controller under Linux and now for v5.20 it's extended to support the company's QUADRO fan controller...

KDE developers are wrapping up July with more bug fixes and other feature work underway for Plasma 5.26...

Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame who has recently been spending much work on improving Linux's "random" kernel code has sent out a proposal adding getrandom() support to the vDSO for better performance in seeking to better address the needs of user-space developers...

Wine 7.14 has been released as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

The Linux 5.19 kernel is to be released this weekend and in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.20 merge window. Based on various Git "-next" queues and mailing list indications, here is a look at some of the changes expected for the Linux 5.20 kernel...

GNOME and Red Hat developers are working on integrating firmware security tips and recommendations into the desktop for warning users about platform/firmware security issues like if UEFI Secure Boot is disabled and other possible avenues their system could be exploited...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers are preparing for an August release of GCC 12.2 as the first stable point release update to this year's GCC 12 series...

With LLVM 15 branched and main now open for LLVM 16, one of the early changes for this next compiler release cycle is enabling scalable vectorization by default for RISC-V with supported targets for RISC-V vector instructions...

The Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for supporting Broadcom VideoCore V/VI graphics that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later is now exposing Vulkan 1.2 support...

The Godot open-source game engine developers announced on Thursday that next week will mark the Godot 4.0 feature freeze as they prepare to ship the Godot 4.0 Beta 1 in September. But ahead of that feature freeze, Godot 4.0 Alpha 13 was released on Thursday afternoon with yet more feature work -- including variable rate shading and other renderer improvements...

Open-source device manufacturer Raptor Computing Systems earlier this month teased their new FPGA-based open-source soft BMC product while today that "Arctic Tern" product has been formally announced...

Google and SkyWater have teamed up the past few years with an open-source design kit for allowing projects to see their open-source silicon designs manufactured. This effort started off on a 130nm process node but announced today is the rolling out of 90nm manufacturing...

Godot as one of the most successful open-source game engine projects is preparing for its Godot 4.0 Beta 1 milestone and as part of that will begin the feature freeze for this major engine update...

Intel has posted a new open-source Linux VPU driver today... Not Video Processing Unit, but it's for a Versatile Processing Unit coming with 14th Gen Core processors...

Linux 5.19 is set to be released this weekend, so here is a reminder about some of the big ticket items to find in this summer 2022 kernel release...

Since the disclosure of Retbleed earlier this month as the newest CPU security vulnerability around speculative execution, I've posted some Intel/AMD benchmarks looking at the mitigation cost for the affected older generations of processors. Last week I also looked at the accumulated CPU mitigation cost on AMD Zen 1. Today is a similar comparison over on the Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" side with looking at the cost of just the Retbleed mitigations and then the overall CPU mitigation cost when toggling all of the various vulnerabilities with the "mitigations=off" flag.

With Intel DG2/Alchemist getting settled, the DRM-Next cutoff for v5.20 kernel material having passed, and Raptor Lake enablement also appearing to be in good shape given the little change over Alder Lake, Intel open-source engineers have begun working more on Meteor Lake driver support that will succeed Raptor Lake next year...

The newest AMD Linux optimization patch for the kernel aims to introduce a cool down period for the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) after each I2C transaction between the x86 CPU and the PSP...

Canonical engineers continue working on their Steam Snap for making that confined version of Valve's Linux game client viable and useful to Ubuntu gamers...

Following this month's approval by the steering committee of GCC Rust as a compiler front-end for the Rust programming language, the first formal series has been sent out for review...

Intel today confirmed they are moving their 6th to 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics (basically all the "Gen9" graphics hardware going back to the Skylake days) to their legacy support model. This primarily impacts Windows but longer-term may have some implications for Linux users...

QEMU 7.1 is working its way toward release as the next major version of this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source virtualization stack...

AMD's GPUOpen group today announced the availability of the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer as their latest offering in the Radeon Developer Tool Suite...

While the cutoff of new feature work to queue in DRM-Next for the next kernel cycle usually ends around the "-rc6" time of the current cycle, AMD has submitted a few last minute items for Linux 5.20 ahead of its merge window opening next week...

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards...

Increase use of Windows BitLocker for full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 is causing more challenges by Linux distributions for supporting convenient dual boot functionality for those wishing to keep both Windows and Linux on the same systems...

In addition to new kernel code and updated firmware fixing a power management issue for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" where C1 and C1E power states were mutually exclusive, another important Sapphire Rapids power management improvement is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel cycle...

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...