Phoronix

While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support...

The platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel continues to be quite active with particularly offering better support for modern Intel/AMD laptops. With Linux 5.15 there is another big batch of improvements that landed at the end of last week...

A change made by Linus Torvalds and merged today for Linux 5.15 is enabling the "-Werror" compiler flag by default for all kernel builds...

Being worked on for several years now on the Linux desktop has been high resolution scrolling including work for it around X Input, the libinput library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems, and the kernel driver side for the HID/input devices to support it. The latest user-space work is high resolution scroll wheel support within the next libinput release. Separately, with Linux 5.15 is now additionally support for high resolution scrolling with the Apple Magic Mouse...

One of the kernel patch series that has seen ongoing work for more than one year now is around introducing the FUTEX2 system call to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' NT kernel in order to allow for more efficient Proton/Wine usage that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

With Linux 5.15 there are optimizations for EXT4, big improvements for XFS, and significant work on Btrfs too. Rounding out the notable file-system work on Linux 5.15, the F2FS updates were submitted and subsequently landed for this next kernel version...

Released at the start of August was dav1d 0.9.1 for this high performance CPU-based AV1 open-source video decoder while now another point release is available with yet more optimizations...

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code...

Stemming from an ongoing Mesa GBM discussion over introducing new gbm_bo_create_with_modifiers2 / gbm_surface_create_with_modifiers2 functions since the original "gbm_*_create_with_modifiers" functions lack support for passing usage flags, NVIDIA confirmed that the Sway Wayland compositor is working fine with their forthcoming driver supporting GBM...

While Samsung has explicitly stated before that queued TRIM works for Samsung 860 SSDs on Linux and thus leading to only older Samsung 840/850 drives being blocked from queued TRIM usage, that turns out to be inaccurate and now more quirks are added for the Samsung 860 and 870 series SSDs on Linux...

While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged...

KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session...

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...

Landing via Andrew Morton's patch series today in the Linux 5.15 kernel is handling for demoting pages during memory reclaim, which can be used for punting cold pages off to slower, tiered memory devices (like Intel persistent memory) when under system memory pressure...

It looks like Paragon Software's NTFS3 kernel driver providing much better Linux support for the Microsoft NTFS file-system will land for the 5.15 kernel!..

The last release of Gzip was v1.10 back at the end of 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded today by Gzip 1.11...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is a new option for further protecting the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling the option will ensure that any caller-used register contents are zeroed prior to returning from a function. While the reported performance cost is said to be small, I decided to run some benchmarks when toggling this new Kconfig hardening option.

Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps...

The Freedesktop SDK as a platform and SDK run-time for Flatpak apps/run-times is out with its first major stable update in one year...

The latest security effort being pursued by Google's Kees Cook is to provide full compile-time and run-time coverage of all detectable buffer overflows...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has upstreamed its GNU Binutils support...

While Linux 5.15 has added KSMBD as an SMB3 in-kernel file server, the NFS code within the Linux kernel continues advancing as well for network file sharing needs. With NFS in Linux 5.15 are a few notable improvements...

Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper...

The GCC compiler when using the default "-O2" optimization level is likely to be slightly faster with next year's GCC 12 release as the developers are looking at enabling the vectorizer options by default...

Last month were our benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on Linux for that new desktop APU with Zen 3 cores and Vega graphics available through retail channels. Due to reader interest and with the Ryzen 5 5600G still readily available via Internet retailers, here is a look at the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Linux performance in a variety of benchmarks.

It's busy on the Linux file-system front for the 5.15 cycle with Btrfs adding a degenerate RAID option along with performance improvements to big improvements for XFS and now comes the EXT4 updates...

The Arm SoC and platform updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel...

Last week I wrote about AMD adding 17 more RDNA2 PCI IDs to their Linux driver which is rather unusual given the amount and the number of PCI IDs already found in the AMDGPU kernel driver for these latest-generation GPUs and the Radeon RX 6000 series already being mid-life. As noted in that article and seemingly in agreement with the various other industry articles following that Phoronix news, it seems to be for some sort of RDNA2 refresh likely. Now those new PCI IDs are being queued up for introduction in the current Linux 5.15 cycle...

When the Qt 6.0 tool-kit debuted last year much of the early criticism stemmed around it not having all the modules/functionality ported over from Qt5 meanwhile The Qt Company was restricting newer Qt 5.15 LTS point releases to paying customers only. Since then the developers have been working to address the voids in Qt6 and with the upcoming Qt 6.2 as their next long-term support release, all of the important functionality should be in place...

The sound/audio drivers have landed for the ongoing Linux 5.15 kernel driver...

In July -- the same month as Valve announcing the Steam Deck -- the Steam on Linux marketshare hit 1.0%. That 1.0% marketshare was a +0.14% bump and the highest seen in years since Steam on Linux's debut nearly a decade ago back when it commanded around a 2% marketshare...

We've been covering Genode OS for more than a decade now as this original open-source operating system "framework" and through this time they have managed to keep up with their routine feature releases. Out this week is Genode OS Framework 21.08 as they seek to make it easier porting device driver code to their platform...

Very large IBM mainframes/servers were taking 30+ minutes to boot the Linux kernel... No, just not for POST'ing the system with memory training and the like, but for loading Linux. Fortunately, with the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a set of scalability enhancements to allow these large IBM systems to be able to boot in around five minutes...

The staging updates for Linux 5.15 continue to have a lot of code churn including some drivers being promoted while one Realtek WiFi driver has been replaced...

While Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will be formally released on 5 October, rolling out today is general availability on Windows Server 2022...

Intel's i965 classic DRI driver is still the default within Mesa for i965 through Haswell generations of Intel integrated graphics, but the new "Crocus" Gallium3D driver has been added to the default driver build list so it's now at least building by default on x86/x86_64 systems and thus trivial after that to override...

The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support...

RadeonSI Gallium3D as the official AMD OpenGL Linux driver has mirrored the unofficial RADV Vulkan driver in enabling DCC stores support for RDNA2 APUs in the name of greater performance...

Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area...

In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed...

For being a summer month, August was much busier than usual with a slew of exciting hardware and Linux/open-source software announcements. From releasing Linux 5.14 in marking 30 years of the Linux kernel to the debut of Debian 11 to Valve Steam Deck related work to their exciting sponsorship of Zink work, August was quite an exciting month for Linux enthusiasts...

Google is shipping Chrome 93 today as the latest stable version of their web browser...

Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support...

The Btrfs file-system updates have landed now in Linux 5.15 mainline with some exciting new features and improvements...

One of the earliest pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 5.15 cycle was proposing KSMBD land as the in-kernel SMB3 file server as an alternative on Linux systems to running Samba in user-space. At the time it wasn't clear if Linus Torvalds would pull in this file server code to the Linux kernel but now he has indeed landed it...

GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu was released today as the project's re-base on the recently released Linux 5.14 upstream kernel. But prior supported GNU Linux-libre releases also had to be re-spun as it turned out this "100% free software" kernel was mistakenly leaving in some non-free kernel bits...

It's been a while since last running benchmarks evaluating the performance of GCC's profile guided optimizations (PGO) for helping to optimize the performance. But stemming from the discussions around PGO'ing the Linux kernel (though that effort is stalled for now), several Phoronix readers inquired about seeing some fresh PGO figures with GCC 11. So here are such benchmarks of GCC 11 with the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

With the Linux 5.15 kernel is a new build-time option to further harden the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling this option can have some (small) performance cost and a slightly larger kernel...