Phoronix

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...

While not immediately relevant to Linux gamers, Epic Games has promoted Unreal Engine 5 from its "early access" phase to now being available in "preview" form for this popular, cross-platform game engine...

AMD has published their latest snapshot of the AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

SQLite 3.38 was released as the first major update of 2022 for this popular embedded SQL database library...

Besides no discussion in years over possibly upstreaming Reiser4 nor have any been brought up about eventually trying to mainline Reiser5, it looks like the original and feature-rich for its original time ReiserFS file-system could be on its way out of the Linux kernel in 2022...

While curl and the cURL library are most commonly used for HTTP(S) and FTP usage, this widely-used software also supports a plethora of other network protocols. In order to save disk space by default and also exposing its cURL packages to less security bugs by default, Fedora is looking at shipping "minimal" versions by default of its cURL packages...

Google today announced Network-Opt as a new open-source library focused on optimizing network topology handling...

Ahead of next month's GNOME 42.0 desktop debut, today marks the GNOME 42 Beta (or "42.beta" as they prefer) and this also initiates the start of the user-interface, API, and feature freeze for this six month update...

The Linux kernel's random number generator code has been seeing a number of improvements recently led by Jason Donenfeld of WireGuard fame...

Being introduced with Linux 5.18 is the new x86-android-tablets driver that is just used for dealing with quirky Intel-powered Android tablets that were designed around running custom vendor kernels for these consumer electronic devices and never the mainline Linux kernel. This x86-android-tablets driver provides workarounds/quirk handling for improving what would otherwise be a buggy experience when trying to run Linux on these devices...

Intel has released libva 2.14 as the newest version of this VA-API (Video Acceleration API) driver-agnostic library. Notably with libva 2.14 is adding an AV1 encode interface for upcoming GPUs having hardware-accelerated AV1 encode...

If you are still using a motherboard with a VIA x86 chipset, it's really long past due to consider upgrading to a newer platform, but if that is not feasible the UniChrome IGP graphics support continues to still be worked on occasionally for Linux in 2022. The OpenChrome driver project remains in a sad state and out-of-tree, but is continuing to see fixes and re-based against newer versions of the Linux kernel...

Squeezing into the GCC 12 compiler release is support for the Shadow Call Stack functionality on 64-bit Arm (AArch64)...

With there being some renewed development interest around FBDEV with the kernel subsystem now having a maintainer, restoring hardware-accelerated scrolling, and other patches pending to clean-up and optimize the frame-buffer device code, there is also a new performance optimization series...

LLVM project founder Chris Lattner who began developing the Swift programming language back in 2010 during his time at Apple is now leaving that programming language's core team...

After Linux 5.16 brought performance improvements that helped the latest "Alder Lake" processors, the performance on the in-development Linux 5.17 is looking steady compared to the current kernel. Here is a look at the Linux 5.15 through 5.17 Git performance for an Intel Core i9 12900K with Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics for gaming performance...

FreeDOS 1.2 released back on Christmas 2016 and now a half-decade later has finally been succeeded by FreeDOS 1.3 for advancing this open-source alternative to MS-DOS...

The upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle will bring a number of improvements for Apple keyboards -- both for the Apple Magic Keyboard and the keyboards integrated with their various MacBook computers...

AMD engineers on Sunday night sent out a patch series getting x2APIC virtualization "x2AVIC" support for the AMD SVM driver with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)...

LLVMpipe as the software OpenGL implementation that runs atop the CPU and Lavapipe as the Vulkan equivalent have seen a recent uptick in activity...

Debuting last December was Mold 1.0 as a high performance, modern linker to compete with GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD. That project was started by Rui Ueyama who originally worked on LLVM's LLD and has been working aggressively on performance optimizations. Sunday night marked the release of Mold 1.1 as the latest major update to this linker...

OpenBLAS as the popular open-source implementation of the BLAS and LAPACK APIs is out with a new feature release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc5 as another weekly test version of Linux 5.17 that will debut as stable in March...

Intel's Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) driver is ready to be merged for the Linux 5.18 kernel now that it's been queued into the x86 platform driver's "for-next" branch...

Thanks to Red Hat engineer Jelle van der Waa, the hid-razer driver is set to be merged into Linux 5.18 next month for dealing with Razer hardware not complying with the HID standard...

Last month Intel posted a new set of Linux patches for shadow stack support as part of the Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) found within their latest processors. Also part of Intel's CET is Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) while Intel said they were going to first focus on shadow stack (SS) and worry about IBT later. Less than one month later, new Indirect Branch Tracking patches for the Linux kernel have been taking shape...

Mesa's Virgl code as part of the Virgil 3D GPU project allows for OpenGL/3D acceleration within QEMU virtual machines with the driver calls then being passed onto the host GPU. Mesa's Virgl code to this stage has relied upon the Gallium3D TGSI intermediate representation while they are working on moving it to the modern and superior NIR...

Following the nasty local privilege escalation vulnerability that was disclosed last month for Polkit's pkexec, Fedora developers are hoping to make pkexec optional later this year with Fedora 37...

Libinput 1.20 is out today as the first update since last September to this widely-used Linux input handling library that is relied on both within X.Org and Wayland powered desktops...

Building off last week's Radeon graphics driver updates for Linux 5.18 that included introducing AMDKFD CRIU and enabling FreeSync Video Mode by default, Friday evening brought a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support...

Intel's forthcoming Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards do support Resizable BAR functionality as covered when they previously published Linux patches for it. They are also now working on a DG2 feature for "small BAR" support...

It's been a while since last hearing anything of Linux block subsystem maintainer's Jens Axboe crusade on achieving the maximum possible IOPS-per-core. However, on Friday he was out with his latest insight in still declaring Intel's Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor as being the king of IOPS-per-core performance at nearly 13M IOPS per CPU core...