Phoronix

The in-development Linux 6.5 kernel is shifting to initializing the x86 floating-point unit (FPU) initialization later in the boot process as part of a broader effort for trying to clean-up the Linux kernel boot process at least on x86/x86_64 systems...

"Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline [Assembly code]," as a nice quote of the day as Linus Torvalds explained after he took on improving upon a performance optimization patch that was proposed for the ongoing Linux 6.5 merge window...

The power management and ACPI feature changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel. As usual, it's most interesting on the Intel and AMD fronts with the power management changes for this kernel that will be released as stable in August...

Ingo Molnar submitted today the scheduler updates destined for the Linux 6.5 kernel. Most noticeable with the CPU scheduler changes are enhancing SMP (Hyper Threading) load balancing for Intel Core CPUs of a hybrid design with a mix of P and E cores...

Blender 3.6 is out today as the latest exciting update for this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software. Exciting with Blender 3.6 is adding Intel hardware ray-tracing support when making use of Arc Graphics. AMD graphics cards on Windows can also enjoy HIP ray-tracing but sadly isn't supported yet for Linux...

Processing the vmlinux.o object with objtool has been the most memory intensive step of the Linux kernel build process. Prior patches have already worked to reduce this objtool memory use while compiling the Linux kernel and a big patch series now set for Linux 6.5 is set to sharply reduce the maximum heap use...

Bcachefs hopes to finally merge in Linux 6.5 while for those wanting a mature Linux file-system with all the bells and whistles, Btrfs is a good candidate worth considering. With Linux 6.5 there is a continuation of the recent Btrfs trend around performance improvements...

ReactOS is the open-source OS that's striving for Microsoft Windows software and driver binary compatibility that is 25 years in the making. ReactOS has been making steady progress while still considered in alpha form. Most of the ReactOS successes and user tinkering has been with the 32-bit build of the OS while they have been making steady progress recently on the x86_64 (x64) port...

In addition to yesterday bringing EDAC support for AMD Zen 4 client CPUs, the set of RAS "Reliability, Availability and Serviceability" updates for the Linux 6.5 kernel have separately brought initial GPU/accelerator support...

The work originating in late 2021 for bringing up secondary CPU cores in parallel at boot-time to help shorten boot/reboot times for large core count servers has finally landed with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel...

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture code has seen some clean-ups and support for new Arm ISA features with the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel...

If your dream is to work for Valve Software, getting experienced with the open-source Linux graphics driver development niche seems to be a decent pathway. Besides Valve, all the big hardware companies are routinely looking for more Linux graphics driver developers as well...

Capping off an exciting first day of the Linux 6.5 merge window is a pull request seeking to land the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system into this next kernel version...

Upsetting many in the open-source community was Red Hat's announcement last week that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and publicly would be limited to the CentOS Stream sources. In turn this causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux moving forward. Red Hat today issued another blog post trying to address some of the criticism...

Faith Ekstrand today published a blog post outlining recent efforts around NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware developed namely by the Nouveau development community. Some recent highlights include:..

For the past year and a half Red Hat engineers have been developing a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer and with the Fedora Workstation 39 release later this year they are looking at possibly switching to it by default...

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has merged support for VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, which is a highly sought after extension by game emulators and also important for DirectX over Vulkan layering efforts and more...

Back in April was the release of Slint 1.0 for this open-source, Rust-focused graphical toolkit formerly known as SixtyFPS. Today marks the release of Slint 1.1 as the first significant feature update after crossing the 1.0 milestone...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been submitted today on this first day of the Linux 6.5 merge window. Headlining the EDAC changes this cycle is bringing AMD Zen 4 client support...

Following yesterday's release of Linux 6.4, the FSFLA team has released GNU Linux-libre 6.4-gnu as the newest version of this downstream kernel that aims for "100% freedom" with removing any kernel remnants that depend upon non-free-software microcode/firmware or other binary blobs as well as removing the ability to load proprietary kernel modules...

Another exciting milestone has been reached on Mozilla's long journey of improving the native Wayland support for the Firefox web browser on Linux...

Among the early pull requests for the now-open Linux 6.5 merge window is the FS-VERITY pull for that support layer enabling file-systems to leverage transparent integrity and authenticity protections fr read-only files. The FS-VERITY updates for Linux 6.5 are helping to ease the upcoming XFS file-system support...

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on providing fully open-source system firmware without binary blobs has been quite active recently. There have been several new systems added recently, introducing support for shipping ROMs without CPU microcode included, and other changes. This latest wor has culminated into the Libreboot 20230625 release...

Vulkan 1.3.255 was quietly released prior to the weekend and brings with it a new cooperative matrix extension...

As expected Linux 6.4 is out today as stable as an on-time release following a relatively quiet cycle the past two months...

Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL implementation Rusticl for Gallium3D drivers has now added experimental FP16 to its feature set...

With Linux 6.4 expected for release today the Linux 6.5 merge window will then open. From my close monitoring of the many "-next" Git development branches along with some early pull requests already submitted, here is a look at some of the features that will likely be found in Linux 6.5 barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds himself...

Earlier this month I ran some fresh benchmarks of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan against RadeonSI. While Zink in general is already quite speedy and in good shape for most workloads, those tests uncovered some troubled spots and Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve has been diving into some of those issues with fixes. Another merge request is pending to deal with inefficiencies in the Mesa Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.11, Wine-Staging 8.11 is out this Sunday morning with 502 patches atop the upstream Wine code...

While the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler has been building the AArch64 and x86_64 mainline Linux kernel builds for quite some time, for those interested in China's LoongArch CPU architecture it's the latest target seeing work to enable compiling the Linux kernel under Clang...

Added to the Linux kernel back in 2020 was a community-written Corsair power supply driver for exposing various sensor data that their higher-end PSUs make available via a USB interface. This reverse-engineered "corsair-psu" driver has continued to be improved upon and adding support for newer Corsair PSUs. A new patch out this weekend extends the corsair-psu driver for handling newer 2022~2023 model power supplies...

With it having been another smooth week so far in the upstream kernel world, it's looking like Linus Torvalds is likely to promote Linux 6.4 tomorrow rather than going ahead with an extra release candidate. As such, here's a reminder about what makes Linux 6.4 a great summer-time kernel upgrade...

With the latest Mesa 23.2 code as of Friday there is now a rather significant performance optimization for Intel's graphics driver stack that really helps out Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist along with upcoming Meteor Lake graphics. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example, was found to be 11% faster now with this single driver change and other Vulkan apps/games benefiting as well...

The KDE Plasma 6 desktop is becoming more "livable" and each week new features continue to be implemented. This week was another lively phase of development toward Plasma 6.0...

Similar to LLVM Clang 17 adding -std=c++26 support as the open-source compiler begins work on the next major revision of the C++ programming language, the GCC 14 compiler code has now also added the -std=c++26 compiler option...

A new bi-weekly release of Wine is now available for enjoying Windows applications and games on Linux and other platforms...

Earlier this year Intel software engineers published a blazing fast AVX-512 sorting library that was initially picked up by Numpy where it netted them 10~17x faster sorts. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 2.0 with even more AVX-512 features in place and additional sorting algorithms added...

The Firewalld open-source firewall daemon has been in development since 2011 while only two years ago did it reach the Firewalld 1.0 milestone. Thus it was a bit surprising to find Firewalld 2.0 being released today...

The Fedora Sericea and Sway spins are eyeing the possibility of shipping without the xorg-x11 packages for being the first X.Org-less desktop spins in the Fedora Linux world...

Among the early pull requests already submitted for the Linux 6.5 merge window that is expected to open next week are the Linux NFS server (NFSD) changes. Notable this cycle is the NFSD and RDMA server code having better NUMA awareness...

SDDM as the QML-based X11 and Wayland display manager commonly used on KDE systems and elsewhere is finally out with a new release...

Merged this week into the GNOME Mutter compositor codebase is what should be a beneficial optimization for those enjoying Linux gaming under the GNOME Wayland session...

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance...

FLAC 1.4.3 is out today as the first update to this Xiph.Org royalty-free, lossless audio codec since last October...

A change proposal that hopes to take place for Fedora 39 would make it easier to have an optionally GRUB-free system by instead performing a clean install with systemd-boot for booting on EFI platforms...

Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.

Wasmer is an open-source WebAssembly implementation that is focused on running sandboxed applications everywhere thanks to the power of WASM while being as performant as traditional native applications. Today marks the availability of Wasmer 4.0 as another step forward for this project...

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball...

Going back a few years there has been experimental development around a Vulkan back-end for KDE's KWin compositor while now a road-map is being formalized for actually bringing Vulkan support to fruition...

Sent in today for the mainline Linux kernel -- days ahead of the expected Linux 6.4 stable release -- is a crash fix for just-released AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops...