Phoronix

With the EXT4 file-system updates for Linux 6.6 there is mostly some code clean-ups and other bug fixing. But one change in particular stands out for its performance impact...

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel...

Among the many changes to land during this first week of the Linux 6.6 cycle were the x86 CPU microcode loader updates that now unconditionally makes that support part of the x86/x86_64 kernel builds...

Going along with AMD's work on AMD openSIL for open-sourcing the CPU silicon initialization code to ultimately replace AGESA in future hardware platforms, the initial EPYC "Genoa" code for Coreboot has been upstreamed along with the Onyx motherboard target...

The Bcachefs file-system code born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code was submitted for Linux 6.5 but ultimately rejected. Bcachefs is now trying again to land for the current Linux 6.6 merge window...

Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward...

The EROFS read-only file-system and F2FS Flash Friendly File-System were among the FS updates to land this week for Linux 6.6 -- in addition to marking ReiserFS as obsolete...

Sriram Ramkrishna at Intel, who serves as the community manager and developer relations for oneAPI, held a virtual oneAPI meetup this week with Red Hat's David Airlie. Airlie should not need any introduction for longtime Phoronix readers given his longtime contributions to the Linux kernel graphics drivers, Mesa, and related open-source graphics work at Red Hat. Airlie shared some interesting remarks around the current Linux GPU compute stacks from the different vendors and associated challenges...

The perf event changes were submitted this week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window with changes this cycle for Intel, AMD, and Arm...

There wasn't any big Vulkan spec update for SIGGRAPH this year but the frequent point releases continue rolling on for this high performance graphics and compute API...

The tmpfs file-system that keeps all of its data within virtual memory has gained a few new features with Linux 6.6, including the long-awaited quota support to better protect against malicious users that could try to consume all of your system RAM...

While leading up to a US holiday weekend, KDE developers haven't let up in their development activities around Plasma 6.0 and associated application work. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary to outline all of the interesting changes for the week...

In July the Steam Survey results pointed to a half percent jump in the Linux gaming marketshare, taking it to nearly 2% thanks to the success of Valve's Steam Deck that runs their Arch Linux powered SteamOS platform. After the big boost in July you are probably wondering what happened in August... Well, a few minutes ago the new Steam Survey monthly results were published...

For those with extra time over the US Labor Day holiday weekend, Linux From Scratch 12 has been published for those wishing to hand-roll their own Linux system build from source. Linux From Scratch 12.0 is accompanied by the Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 12.0 release too, including the systemd variant, for further extending LFS installations with more packages...

Following the recent Wine summer holiday, Wine 8.15 is out today and back on track with the usual two-week release regiment...

Palmer Dabbelt sent out the initial batch of RISC-V processor architecture updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel port...

The DeviceTree changes for Linux 6.6 add the ability to generate DeviceTree (DT) nodes for PCI devices. AMD spearheaded this effort for applying DeviceTree overlays to PCI devices containing non-discoverable downstream devices...

The media subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.6 kernel and most notably is introducing the Intel IVSC MEI drivers as well as extending the Intel IPU bridge logic to work with these new drivers...

OpenColorIO (OCIO) as the open-source color management solution for motion picture production and maintained by the Academy Software Foundation is out with a new feature release that will be part of their 2024 VFX Reference Platform. Notable with this release are new SIMD optimizations with AVX/AVX2 and Arm NEON...

While approaching the end of summer, there's no breaks at Phoronix and over the course of August were 240 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. Here is a look back at what was most exciting for the month...

Released nearly one year ago was GNU Wget2 2.0 as a big improvement over Wget to support more protocols like HTTP/2, enabling multi-threading support and parallel connections, and a range of other feature additions. Published on Thursday was Wget2 2.1 as the newest step forward for this much-improved Wget open-source downloading solution...

In addition to NFSD bringing a thrilling feature for Linux 6.6 in the form of NFSv4 write delegation support, the NFS client code for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel also has a notable feature change...

Following the releases this week of Intel's SVT-AV1 1.7 encoder and the libavif 1.0 AV1 Image File Format release, Google engineers are out with libaom 3.7 as the newest feature release to that AV1 encode library...

The Intel Shadow Stack support that is part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) has finally been merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel after it was previously rejected by Linus Torvalds...

The Linux mitigation for the Intel Gather Data Sampling (GDS) "Downfall" vulnerability was updated to reflect all Skylake and Kabylake CPUs being vulnerable to this nasty issue. Due to those Skylake client processors reaching the end of their official support life at Intel, the original Linux mitigation for GDS/Downfall didn't properly protect those older Core processor models...

Chuck Lever III of Oracle has submitted the NFSD changes for Linux 6.6 for this NFS server of which he is particularly thrilled about one of the new features this cycle...

With the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel adding support for more upcoming Radeon graphics processors, that means more auto-generated header files for the new IP blocks... I was curious to see the overall size now of the AMDGPU kernel driver along with its associated code like the AMDKFD compute driver. It's now above 5 million lines for the kernel driver portion...

The first release candidate of PHP 8.3 is now available for testing this annual feature release...

As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as "Supported" but is officially treated as "Obsolete" within the Linux kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel to provide new features for the number of kernel graphics drivers and other AI accelerator drivers within the mainline kernel...

A pull request was sent out this week to introduce the GenPD subsystem and add a new drivers/genpd area for the GenPD provider drivers to the kernel... To which Linus Torvalds wonders what the heck is a "GenPD" as probably most of you are also wondering about...

As part of the long ongoing effort around Wine Wayland support for upstream in order to be able to utilize Wayland directly without a reliance on XWayland when running Windows games/apps, the sixth part to that enablement has been posted for review...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window...

There are some notable changes around the XFS file-system for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel, including a new release manager taking over duties...

Moving forward Google engineers are working to roll-out new Chrome stable releases even faster...

For those making use of the IntelliJ integrated development environment (IDE), JetBrains has been working to enable native Wayland support...

The various Arm platform and SoC changes have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window...

While I have been eagerly following the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU initialization that will eventually replace AGESA, today AMD announced a new open-source firmware drop: the SEV firmware has been made open-source...

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are working on a new set of interfaces for user-space to support OverDrive overclocking. While AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking has been supported on Linux for years, the current interface isn't sufficient for all the power/overclocking controls moving forward...

Some code cleaning within the sysctl space of the Linux kernel will eventually eliminate around 64 bytes of bloat per array within the kernel where a sentinel can be removed...

While we are eagerly awaiting ROCm support for more RDNA3 GPUs said to be coming later this calendar year, shipping Tuesday night was ROCm 5.6.1 as the newest point release for this open-source GPU compute stack...

MidnightBSD 3.1 is now available for this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-forked operating system that aims to be "the BSD for everyone" with an Xfce-based desktop and focus on ease of use...

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) has been part of the mainline kernel for two decades to provide a security module implementing access control security policies and is now widely-used for enhancing the security of production Linux servers and other systems. Those that haven't been involved with Linux for a long time may be unaware that SELinux originates from the US National Security Agency (NSA). But now with Linux 6.6 the NSA references are being removed...

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver...

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features...

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms...

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are a number of core networking improvements this cycle, support for various new wired and wireless chipsets, and improvements made to existing Ethernet and WiFi drivers...

To help harden the Linux kernel from memory vulnerabilities and in particular heap spraying, set to be merged into the Linux 6.6 kernel is optional support for randomized slab caches for kmalloc() calls...

The EEVDF scheduler code has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel. EEVDF replaces the existing CFS scheduler code. There is the likelihood of some performance regressions initially though but the developers will be working to address them as they arise. Additionally, this scheduler pull also re-introduces cluster scheduling for Intel Core hybrid processors...

Among the exciting early pull requests to land in the new Linux 6.6 kernel cycle are some nice improvements to the IOmap code that should yield some substantive I/O benefits with this new kernel...