Phoronix

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM...

Last month Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers began posting patches working on DisplayPort 2.0 support for their driver with DG2/Alchemist now set to be Intel's first GPU supporting the newest DP standard. DP 2.0 enablement work continues with Panel Replay being the latest feature being worked on for their Linux driver...

In addition to Linus Torvalds dealing with the -Werror fallout, separately in kernel land there were also some significant performance regressions introduced during the Linux 5.15 that led to Linus reverting some of the changes...

Landing this past weekend was the surprise move by Linus Torvalds to enable "-Werror" behavior by default for all kernel builds. That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build. As expected, this change has led to quite a mess...

GhostBSD 21.09.06 is now available as the latest release of this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-based operating system...

The Linux 5.15 Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes this cycle are quite exciting on the x86 (x86_64) front with several prominent additions...

While The Khronos Group previously hosted in-person Vulkan events, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic their "Vulkanised 2021" event next month has morphed into a free virtual event...

Recently with my Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G Zen 3 APUs with Radeon Vega graphics I touched on the GPU graphics/compute performance in some of the basic benchmarks while in this article are a number of Steam Play and native Linux gaming benchmarks for looking at the potential for these latest-generation desktop APUs for Linux gaming.

After many development snapshots and three years worth of work, OpenSSL 3.0 is now available as a major update to this widely-used SSL library...

The X.Org Distributed Multihead X (DMX) DDX driver has been dropped from the X.Org Server source tree due to its rather broken state for more than one decade...

While Linus Torvalds isn't much of a fan of FUSE / user-space file-systems, the FUSE code within the kernel does continue making improvements...

Vulkan 1.2.191 is out this morning as the latest update to this graphics/compute API. As usual is a variety of bug fixes / clarifications to the specification while this time around is also one new extension...

For more than a year there has been work on FGKASLR for finer grained kernel address space layout randomization. While KASLR is widely-used these days, with enough guessing or unintentional kernel leakage, the base address of the kernel can be figured out. Finer grained KASLR allows for randomization at the per-functional level to dramatically boost defenses. The latest take on FG-KASLR has now been published...

To help out memory pressure / out-of-memory killing solutions like systemd-oomd or Android's LMKD, Linux 5.15 is introducing the "process_mrelease" system call to more quickly free the memory of dying processes...

The RISC-V architecture updates have landed in the Linux 5.15 kernel with more software features now being supported...

Notcurses as an open-source library designed for complex and "blingful" text user interfaces and character graphics, now works not only on Linux but also Windows and macOS. Notcurses makes it easy for CLI-based programs to support a wide range of colors, multimedia, Unicode, and other features not normally associated with command-line applications...

Intel Compute Runtime 21.35.20826 is available today with initial support for oneAPI Level Zero v1.2...

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...