Phoronix

The Btrfs file-system continues seeing new performance optimizations and other work, thanks in part to the renewed interest around the file-system with Fedora Workstation continuing to use it by default along with openSUSE and other Linux distributions...

Vulkan 1.2.197 is out with a variety of documentation updates, clarifications to the specification, and other work. Plus there is one new extension this time around...

Given the wide range of hardware running Linux and especially Linux being dominant in the data center, the networking changes each kernel cycle remain quite vibrant. Linux 5.16 is no exception with the main feature pull sent in on Monday for all the networking updates...

While Ampere Altra and Altra Max processors are achieving great success using Arm Neoverse N1 based cores, as shared earlier this year Ampere has begun designing their own custom Arm server CPU cores for slated introduction in 2022. The first GCC compiler patch for that next-gen Ampere CPU was quietly posted on Monday...

After going through a number of rounds of patch revisions over the past year, Intel's kernel-side changes for supporting Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) with next-gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors has landed for Linux 5.16!..

Back in July Steam on Linux re-crossed the 1.0% marketshare threshold following the announcement of the Steam Deck and continued progress around Steam Play / Proton. The Steam on Linux user-base has continued growing month by month and has hit another high with the numbers published today that cover the month of October...

AMD today released Radeon Open eCosystem 4.5 (ROCm 4.5) as the latest version to their open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems. ROCm 4.5 brings with it a number of new features and improvements but one area on the consumer Radeon side will leave some potential users frustrated...

The proposed memory "folios" functionality for Linux 5.16 is happening! This low-level change to the Linux memory management code was merged today for this next kernel...

Making rounds today are the "Trojan Source" attacks by which text displayed to the end-user/developer doesn't match what is actually being executed. The problem stems from Unicode standards and could lead to malicious code being inadvertently introduced into upstream code-bases that could be overlooked during code review processes, etc. GCC and LLVM/Clang are among the early compilers preparing defenses against Trojan Source style attacks...

The big set of block changes for Linux 5.16 were merged today with the opening of the new kernel cycle. While the massive I/O optimizations tackled recently has been a main focus, there is also much more to the block subsystem coming with Linux 5.16...

MPV 0.34 is now available as the newest version of this popular Linux video player that is powered by FFmpeg and forked originally from MPlayer/mplayer2 code...

Linux 5.16 is adjusting its default Spectre mitigation behavior around Spectre V2 for user-space tasks as well as Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) for Spectre V4 mitigation...

Google announced today that now through at least the end of January they will be providing higher payment amounts for security researchers disclosing new vulnerabilities affecting the Linux kernel...

FWUPD 1.7.1 is out today as the newest release of this leading open-source solution for allowing firmware updates from UEFI motherboards to various peripherals under Linux and other platforms...

As we approach the end of the calendar year there was some uncertainty whether Linux 5.15 would be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel or if it would be Linux 5.16 albeit not likely releasing until the start of 2022.....

PHPStan 1.0 was released today as the first stable release for this leading open-source PHP static analysis tool...

As expected after first reporting on it a month ago when the FUTEX2 patches were queued up in locking/core, this work with the new sys_futex_waitv() system call for helping the Windows on Linux gaming experience will indeed land for Linux 5.16...

It was an exciting October even amid the ongoing pandemic as at least Linux/open-source enthusiasts were able to enjoy the Ubuntu 21.10 debut, ongoing Linux I/O optimizations many of which are now coming to mainline in 5.16, numerous AMD driver enhancements, NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack finally introducing GBM support, X.Org Server 21.1 released, and much more...

Right after last night's Linux 5.15 kernel release, the Free Software Foundation folks issued GNU Linux-libre 5.15-gnu as the newest version of their downstream that removes functionality dependent upon binary-only/non-free-software firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load closed kernel modules and other determined non-free-software restrictions...

Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week...

Back in September at the end of the Linux 5.15 merge window was our Linux 5.15 feature overview but given the time since then and that the Linux 5.15 stable kernel will likely be released this evening, here is a recap of the most interesting changes in this new kernel version...

After memory folios failed to make it into Linux 5.15, this low-level change to the kernel memory management code that has possible performance implications is looking to land for Linux 5.16...

Back in February 2020 SDL2 began seeing early work for RISC OS support. Now being merged this weekend to this key library used by many cross-platform games is now more functioning support for the RISC OS Arm-based operating system...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe has prepared his various pull requests ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has landed native support for OpenRISC on Linux and GDB server support...

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan open-source driver "RADV" is preparing to introduce experimental support for mesh shaders...

Mozilla Firefox 94 will begin using its EGL back-end on the Linux desktop in conjunction with supported graphics drivers in order to provide better performance, lower power usage, and other benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.23 offers much better Plasma Wayland support than prior releases but still the journey of polished Wayland support on-par with X11 is not over. KDE developers ended out October working on more Wayland fixes along with other improvements to this open-source desktop...

OpenVDB is the software open-sourced by DreamWorks Animations that is now part of the Academy Software Foundation as a sparse volume data structure and associating tooling with a particular focus on visual effects and animations for film production. OpenVDB 9.0 is out today as the latest major update to this library...

While Ardour is arguably the most well known open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solution, there are also other offerings like Zrythm and others while now "Stargate" is the newest option available...

Project Trident had been an operating system originally based on TrueOS/FreeBSD before shifting to Void Linux as its base and worked on various innovations like OpenZFS-based root installations but now the developers behind the ambitious advanced desktop OS project have decided to call it quits...

While there has been less major progress to report on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan code in recent weeks, Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve and others continue optimizing and fixing this increasing useful implementation. Most recently the game Bioshock: Infinite is running on Zink and there are more fixes in aiming toward OpenGL 4.6 conformance...

In early September AMD posted their new "amd-pstate" CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux that leverages ACPI CPPC data available with Zen 2 and newer processors for making wiser frequency scaling decisions. The goal of AMD P-State is to offer better performance-per-Watt and today they have posted a new revision of this driver...

Well known AMD open-source OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has landed another big batch of patches to further lower the driver overhead of this Linux OpenGL driver...

Earlier this year was talk of finally retiring the Intel "i965" Mesa classic OpenGL driver along with the rest of the "classic Mesa" driver code now that it's been replaced by the Crocus Gallium3D driver and the other open-source Mesa OpenGL divers all using the modern Gallium3D architecture. Those plans are still on but shifting now into 2022...

With X.Org Server 21.1 having finally shipped this week, the X.Org Server Autotools build system support has been killed off...

A set of patches improving the return trampoline "Retpoline" code used for Spectre V2 mitigations has made its way into tip.git's "objtool/core" staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

It's been nine months since the release of Wayland 1.19 while now release plans have been drafted for Wayland 1.20...

Running the newest Steam client beta paired with the newest Proton Experimental should yield more Windows games working on Steam Play with Linux...

Amazon Web Services today announced the open-source Babelfish for PostgreSQL server project. Babelfish allows for applications written against Microsoft SQL Server to work seamlessly with PostgreSQL...

After dealing with blocker bugs the past two weeks, Fedora 35 is now confirmed for releasing next week...

Disclosed last year by Arm was their processors affected by a straight-line speculation vulnerability. In this case the processor could speculatively execute instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. There has been talk about possible straight-line speculation on x86/x86_64 but without any action while now GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler developers along with Linux kernel developers are preparing such mitigation support...

The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged...

As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.

With Blender 3.0 releasing soon, the Blender project has published a Blender 3.x road-map outlining some of their plans for future releases...

It's been six years already since VESA published the Embedded DisplayPort 1.4b specification while finally it's been succeeded by eDP 1.5...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is launching the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as their newest single board computer succeeding the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W...

If you happen to have a Nitrokey FIDO U2F as a two-factor authentication key, proper Linux support is about to land. While at launch it mentioned working out-of-the-box across all major browsers and platforms -- including Linux -- a change is needed to the kernel that's now on the way for the 5.16 cycle...

One could consider it long overdue, but DragonFlyBSD has finally merged support for FAT file-systems with the makefs utility...