Phoronix

Enterprise security firm Edera today is announcing OpenPaX that they promoted in their advance press notice as a "new open-source alternative to GrSecurity." GrSecurity being the firm focused on providing out-of-tree Linux kernel patches focused in the name of security enhancements. With OpenPaX they are open-source and publicly available kernel patch for mitigating common memory safety errors and other system hardening...

DRM_Panic is the functionality first added in Linux 6.10 for "Blue Screen of Death" type functionality when a kernel panic occurs or similar for displaying a nice graphical error message. Since the initial introduction it's been extended to handle QR code error messages, monochrome logos, and other customization options. The AMDGPU driver has new patches available for expanding the DRM_Panic support to all DCE/DCN-based graphics cards...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver used by all modern AMD Radeon graphics hardware has landed support in Mesa 24.3 for async VCE/UVD video operations to enhance the performance with the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

Support for making use of Vulkan with VirtIO-GPU while using QEMU could very soon be upstream...

Wasmer 5.0 is now available as the latest major update to this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime focused on being able to allow developers to write "universal apps" that will run anywhere thanks to the power and versatility of WebAssembly...

Shotcut 24.10 is now available as the latest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editor built atop the MLT framework, Qt6, FFmpeg, SDL, and other software components...

Intel off their typical second Tuesday of the month patch regiment today posted new CPU microcode just for 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" and 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" processors for Linux systems. Notable with the updated Raptor Lake CPU microcode is the internal voltage handling fix for that well known problem plaguing many Raptor Lake owners plus two other fixes...

Following the rather bizarre blog post two weeks ago of laptop vendor MALIBAL suggesting not supporting Coreboot due to their frustrating experiences dealing with Coreboot consulting firms, the Coreboot project itself has now issued a response...

For years there have been statements about how over half of the VMs running within the Microsoft Azure public cloud are Linux-based... In a new blog post today is the first time I am seeing Microsoft cite now "over 60%" Linux marketshare on Microsoft's cloud...

CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation...

Earlier this year Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 memory for AMD and Intel desktops and catering to gamers. With the newest AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Arrow Lake) processors out there and enjoying even faster memory, today Micron announced the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 memory kits for greater performance. In advance of today's launch I have been testing the Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 32GB Kit (16GBx2) UDIMM Kit (CP2K16G64C38U5B) and have some initial benchmarks to share from the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake desktop.

Fedora 41 is ready for release today as a wonderful update to this leading edge Linux distribution...

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle will be adding RISC-V support for user-space pointer masking and tagged address ABI...

A set of patches are currently under review on the Linux kernel mailing list for helping to further lower idle power use for Xeon 6 Sierra Forest processors...

Thanks to Valve's Linux graphics team, VK_EXT_device_generated_commands is now supported by the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release...

Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock...

David Rosca working for AMD has continued to improve their open-source video acceleration support within Mesa. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 is the code within the Gallium3D video acceleration front-end and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for handling AV1 still picture encode...

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii is out with an insightful blog post today on how XWayland window resizing has been enhanced for Plasma 6.3 so that resizing X11 clients will now appear much more polished than the status quo...

Following last week's launch testing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K Arrow Lake desktop processors, the next area I've been exploring deeper has been the DDR5 memory performance including with CUDIMMs. Here's a closer look at the Core Ultra 9 285K performance under Linux while testing several different sets of memory and running Ubuntu 24.10.

Going back to earlier in the year AMD Linux engineers have been prepping the kernel for PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) support that allows for hints that can be injected to improve latency and lowering traffic congestion when there are several possible cache locations on the server with the TPH noting the optimal location of a Transaction Layer Packet (TLP). This PCIe TPH support is set to be merged upstream with the forthcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

Mozilla Firefox 132.0 release builds are now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for this newest monthly feature release to this open-source web browser...

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a still-maintained fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop software is out with a new point release...

While the sched_ext extensible scheduler code was merged for Linux 6.12, work on sched_ext itself it is not over. New patches this weekend continue working on NUMA awareness for it with its default idle selection policy while similar work on CPU last level cache (LLC) awareness are slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

Another feature to look forward to with this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release is the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware now supporting Rusticl-based OpenCL compute...

Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today's new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices...

While the Linux 6.12 kernel enables Intel Xe2 Battlemage discrete GPU support out-of-the-box as a sign of its maturing state, there are a number of patches for the open-source Battlemage driver support that are ongoing. One of the areas seeing some patches recently are around enhancing the display features with Battlemage's upgraded capabilities. Plus there's ongoing work around next-gen Xe3 graphics too...

It turns out the latest AMD Ryzen desktop processors offer support for AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) that previously was only limited to mobile platforms...

Intel has issued their newest quarterly feature release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel, which is their developer staging area of new video acceleration related patches for Intel graphics hardware that they are working to upstream within the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg library...

Sway 1.10 released on Sunday as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor for the Linux desktop...

Following a busy week of kernel drama stemming from the Russian sanctions impacting Linux maintainers, Linus Torvalds is out with the Linux 6.12-rc5 weekly test candidate...

Sent out in original patch form this past week and already iterated to a second version this Sunday, a new proposal is underway to introduce "hung_task_detect_count" as a convenient means of tracking the number of times hung tasks are detected since boot...

Intel merged Linear Address Masking into the Linux kernel last year as a means of allowing user-space to store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. LAM can be useful for virtual machines, sanitizers / profiling / memory tagging, and other uses. While the brand new Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs support LAM, the Linux kernel is now disabling LAM out of security concerns...

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel...

The Linux NETFS code as a network file-system helper library is seeing patches to help enhance the read performance for solutions like CIFS as well as adding single blob object support...

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption...

Vulkan 1.3.300 debuted on Friday with a handful of fixes and one new extension...

With Linux 6.13 there is going to be the initial kernel graphics driver support for Xe3 in integrated form to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 this quarter is the initial OpenGL and Vulkan driver enablement for Xe3 graphics...

Submitted today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes for merging ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc5 release due out on Sunday. For the most part mostly mundane fixes. But notable is an ASUS WMI fix to address the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance issue I've pointed out now in several articles...

Following the recent concerns over Bitwarden potentially moving further away from open-source given SDK changes that appeared, Bitwarden has now further addressed the situation to ease the community concerns...

KDE developers continue being very busy prepping more bug fixes for the Plasma 6.2.x series while continuing to work on new feature material for Plasma 6.3...

Linus Torvalds took to some coding himself today to fix a user-address masking non-canonical speculation issue. The Linux kernel needed an adaptation for this "Meltdown Lite" issue due to different behavior with the latest AMD Zen 5 processors...

Yesterday for the Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake launch date was my extensive look at the Core Ultra 9 285K under Ubuntu Linux for that 24-core desktop processor. Under focus today is the lower-tier Intel Core Ultra 5 245K with a large variety of Linux performance benchmarks for showing how this 14-core processor compares to prior Intel Core CPUs as well as the AMD Ryzen competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

A big batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute driver updates were mailed in for DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle...

While last week Qualcomm canceled their Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit as a $899 USD mini PC built for Windows 11 on ARM and powered by the X1 Elite SoC, the upstreaming Linux support for it is continuing...

The newest drm-misc-next pull request was submitted today ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

Back in 2020~2021 there was lots of talk and work around FUTEX2 for improving the Linux kernel's Futex implementation for fast user mutex. The FUTEX2 work was driven in large part for helping Steam Play / Wine gaming by better matching the behavior of Microsoft Windows with its WaitForMultipleObjects handling. While the initial code landed back in Linux 5.16, there's been other remaining FUTEX2 features still desired like variable-sized futexes and NUMA-awareness. Finally now we're seeing that work revived...

Cloud Hypervisor 42.0 is out as the newest update of this open-source, Rust-based hypervisor that began as an Intel software project but is now developed by a number of different organizations from Arm to Microsoft...

For the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle there is Xe2 Ultra Joiner and GPU temperature monitoring support along with initial Xe3 graphics support for integrated form with Panther Lake among the Intel graphics driver changes expected so far. Another batch of the Xe kernel graphics driver changes were submitted today for modern Intel graphics with this upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle...

When a number of Russian Linux developers were removed from their MAINTAINERS file in the Linux kernel, it was described as due to "compliance requirements" but vague in what those requirements entailed. Linus Torvalds then commented on the Russian Linux maintainers being de-listed and made it clear that they were done due to government compliance requirements / legal issues around Russia. Now today some additional light has been shed on those new Linux kernel "compliance requirements"...

Earlier this month Intel announced the Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake" processors and today they go on sale. In turn, the review embargo also lifts for these new desktop processors. Up first today on Phoronix is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Linux performance review for this flagship 24-core desktop processor.