Phoronix

An interesting merge request opened this week and already merged for Mesa 24.3 comes from an Autodesk engineer adding Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) around Apple's Metal API for use on macOS...

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged...

GNOME 47 is out today as the latest major update to this popular open-source desktop environment...

For those wondering about the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation performance on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the up-to-date NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers now relying on the open-source kernel modules, this article is for you in looking at the performance of this high-end workstation graphics card on the up-to-date Linux software stack. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation is tested alongside the RTX 2000 / 4000 Ada Generation graphics cards and also the AMD Radeon PRO W7000 series competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Not to be confused with the proposal a few days ago by an AMD engineer for Attack Vector Controls for broader control over CPU security mitigation handling, the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel is adding new Kconfig options to allow for more build-time control over what CPU security mitigation code is compiled for the kernel...

The big set of power management updates for Linux 6.12 have landed...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.35.30872.22 released today as the newest tagged version of this open-source GPU compute stack providing oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL support for Linux and Windows systems...

Merged as part of the Linux Security Modules (LSM) updates for the Linux 6.12 kernel is the new Integrity Policy Enforcement (IPE) module that has been years in the making. Integrity Policy Enforcement is an alternative to access controls...

The Btrfs file-system continues marching ahead with the Linux 6.12 kernel...

A patch was sent out on Sunday for adding new Linux kernel configuration options for tuning the kernel build to different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. The intent is on generating kernel builds that are faster for use on modern Intel and AMD systems. However, this patch is likely to not be accepted in the mainline kernel and has already been criticized upstream Linux kernel developers...

Last week the initial AMD Zen 5 "znver5" enablement for LLVM/Clang was posted by an AMD compiler engineer. That code has since undergone review and merged for LLVM 20 Git and yesterday then back-ported for LLVM 19...

OpenJDK 23 is now generally available as the reference implementation to Java 23...

The printk changes to finish the NBCON consoles work has been merged for Linux 6.12! This is the last remaining blocker on real-time "PREEMPT_RT" support from being upstreamed. We're now tantalizing close to seeing the real-time kernel support merged after many years of being out-of-tree patches...

LLVM 19.1 is out today as the first stable version of the LLVM 19 compiler stack including the Clang 19 C/C++ compiler...

The beta of Fedora 41 is out today ahead of the planned stable release in October for this leading-edge Linux distribution with many new features...

Canonical today shipped Mir 2.18 as the latest version of this set of open-source libraries for assembly Wayland-based shells. Mir 2.18 brings a number of new features including Wayland server-side decorations...

Ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" laptops beginning to ship starting next week, the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.8 is now available as the latest software update for embracing the Intel NPU for AI offloading...

Jakub Kicinski submitted the networking subsystem updates over the weekend for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable this cycle is Device Memory TCP for zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions...

The FreeBSD camp today released FreeBSD 13.4 as the newest point release to the FreeBSD 13 stable series for those that haven't yet migrated to the FreeBSD 14 series...

Red Hat engineer Paolo Bonzini submitted the initial batch of KVM changes targeting the Linux 6.12 kernel. This is just the first batch and notably lacking all of the KVM x86 Intel/AMD changes for the cycle. But in the non-x86 space there is a fair amount of activity for this next kernel version for those making use of KVM as part of the open-source virtualization stack...

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far...

All of the ARM SoC and platform updates have been sent out for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Exciting this cycle is finally having initial support for the Raspberry Pi 5 plus supporting several more Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops...

The MMC updates for the Linux 6.12 kernel include the introduction of a new kernel subsystem for Replay Protected Memory Block (RPMB) drivers...

The EROFS read-only open-source file-system has seen initial patches posted today for beginning to re-implement the C code within the Rust programming language for better safety guarantees and the possibility of more performance optimizations...

Following the weekend news of the AMDGPU kernel driver becoming too large that it's causing the Plymouth boot splash screen on slower Linux systems to time-out, longtime AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olak expressed a new idea for helping to reduce some bloat from this AMD kernel graphics driver...

While having the Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server in the lab for AmpereOne benchmarking with the flagship AmpereOne A192-32X processor, I took the opportunity to run some fresh GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler performance benchmarks on AArch64. Here are those results for that healthy competition between these open-source C/C++ compilers on AmpereOne cores.

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.11 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.11-gnu kernel is now available that is the downstream stripping out driver support/features depending upon closed-source microcode/firmware and other modifications in the name of software freedom and ensuring no closed-source bits are used on Linux-libre-enabled systems...

The file structure is one of the most widely-used data structures by Linux kernel drivers. The file struct represents an open file and thus obviously very important and ubiquitous throughout the kernel. With the Linux 6.12 kernel the file struct has been adjusted so it's smaller than before and in turn could help with performance for file-heavy workloads...

Presented earlier this month at the Open-Source Firmware Conference was TamaGo as a means of running Go programming language code bare metal on Arm SoCs as well as eyeing RISC-V too. TamaGo can allow for "0% C and 100% Go code" for ARM/RISC-V device firmware to enhance security...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates were among the early pull requests submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle in advance of this week's Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit in Austria. Among the EDAC work this cycle is preparing memory address translation support for future AMD platforms...

The 64-bit ARM changes were submitted in advance for the now-open Linux 6.12 kernel merge window. There is work for Arm on the confidential computing side this cycle and other new features...

Valkey 8.0 was released today as this leading fork of the Redis open-source code that was started by the Linux Foundation early in the year and backed by organizations from Amazon/AWS to Google Cloud, Oracle, and others. With the Valkey 8.0 release a big focus has been on increasing performance and striving to being capable of delivering one million requests per second...

Jens Axboe submitted the block and IO_uring changes already for the now-open Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable from this Linux I/O work is adding async discard support to IO_uring...

As expected the Linux 6.11 kernel has been promoted to stable and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 24.10, Fedora 41, and other autumn Linux distribution releases...

It's expected to be the Linux 6.11 release day! We are just hours away from hopefully seeing Linux 6.11 stable christened as the kernel set to power the likes of Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora 41. Here's a reminder of some of the most interesting new features and changes to look forward to with Linux 6.11...

The modern AMD kernel graphics driver "AMDGPU" is the biggest driver within the mainline Linux kernel and is approaching six million lines of code albeit a large chunk of that is made up of auto-generated header files for each supported GPU. But this AMDGPU kernel driver is becoming "really really big" that it's beginning to cause issues for Plymouth that commonly provides the initial boot splash screen experience on modern Linux desktops...

Yet another early pull request for the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window is the sound (audio) driver updates for this next kernel cycle. There is a lot of sound driver work this cycle from new audio bits to removing legacy Intel driver support...

Ahead of the expected Linux 6.11 stable release today and the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit happening this coming week in Vienna, Intel engineer Rafael Wysocki submitted early the ACPI updates among the other areas of the kernel he oversees as part of the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window...

With the mainline Linux kernel beginning to see DeviceTree support for a few Snapdragon X1 powered laptops like the ASUS Vivobook S15 and Lenovo Yoga Slim7x, Ubuntu developers at Canonical appear to be beginning their exploration around supporting some of the Snapdragon X1 hardware with Ubuntu Linux...

The Linux 6.11 kernel is expected to be christened as stable tomorrow. Ahead of that stable release one of the last minute "fixes" is adding in another ID for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake processors...

As a very last minute change ahead of tagging GNOME Mutter 47, merged this morning to Mutter is support for the XDG session management Wayland protocol. This protocol is useful for letting clients request support from the compositor for saving the window state for use on future executions. However, it's currently disabled by default and won't be entirely baked until GNOME 48...

Niri 0.1.9 is out today as the latest update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that is written in Rust...

Casilda is a new open-source project by GNOME developer Juan Pablo Ugarte to serve as a Wayland compositor widget. Casilda allows for embedding other processes windows within a GTK4 application...

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel merge window opening on Monday, the printk updates were submitted in advance given the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit also taking place next week in Vienna. Notable with the printk updates is finishing up the NBCON console work that is notable as the last major blocker before real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined...

The EROFS read-only file-system changes have been submitted now for ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window. Notable this cycle is EROFS adding support for file-backed mounts...

KDE developers were busy this week in Germany for their annual Akademy developer conference but they still managed to release a Plasma 6.2 Beta as well as some early feature work toward Plasma 6.3...

GNOME developers have been making progress on being able to individually encrypt user home directories as well as modernizing platform infrastructure as part of the investments made by Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund...

As written about early in the year, future Intel CPUs will be moving past the "Family 6" identification used since the mid-1990s with the P6 micro-architecture. Since then Intel has continued releasing new CPUs under "Family 6" with different model IDs while AMD has been more open to changing its Family ID every Zen generation or two. With Intel using Family 6 for so long it led to a lot of Linux kernel code just relying on Model ID comparisons for determining between Intel CPU generations and the like. Thus a lot of Intel CPU model handling reworks are needed for preparing future Intel CPU generations that will no longer be in Family 6. With Linux 6.12 it looks like that work will be wrapping up...

AMD engineers today posted the first "request for comments" patches in enabling support for Secure AVIC guest handling as a new hardware feature with upcoming processors...

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used on Windows as a shader compiler back-end and both for Windows/Linux as part of their OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack can now be compiled for RISC-V 64-bit...