Printk Cleanups Ready For Linux 6.6 - Stepping Towards Threaded/Atomic Console Printing
A set of printk clean-ups were sent in today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. These clean-ups are important as they are a stepping stone towards the threaded / atomic console printing and in turn that is the last major blocker before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can finally be upstreamed in the kernel...
Fwupd 1.9.5 Released With Optional Passim Support, Firmware Updating For New Devices
Fwupd 1.9.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for enabling system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). With the Fwupd 1.9.5 some additional devices are now supported plus there are some other core improvements...
Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs
Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices...
Partial SMT Enablement Support Lands For Linux 6.6
As part of the "smp/core" changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel, partial SMT enablement landed for processors that support more than two threads per physical core to allow greater run-time control over just how many threads to enable...
OpenBLAS 0.3.24 Released With Intel Sapphire Rapids Improvements, Apple M2 Detection
OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels...
EXT4 Lands A Nice Performance Improvement For Appending To Delalloc Files
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...
Stadia Controller Rumbles & New Gaming Peripherals Supported By Linux 6.6
There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel...
Linux 6.6 Unconditionally Enables x86 CPU Microcode Loading Support
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...
Initial AMD EPYC Genoa Support Added To Coreboot, New Onyx Motherboard Target
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...
Bcachefs File-System Re-Submitted For Linux 6.6
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 Dropping Its 32-bit MIPS Little Endian "mipsel" Port
Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian "mipsel" CPU architecture port moving forward...
EROFS Lands DEFLATE Compression, F2FS Improves Zoned Devices In Linux 6.6
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...
David Airlie Shares His Thoughts On Current Challenges With Linux GPU Compute Stacks
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...
Linux 6.6 Perf Events Prepare For Intel's Crestmont In Grand Ridge & Sierra Forest
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...
Vulkan 1.3.263 Released With A New NVIDIA Extension
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...
Tmpfs Gains New Features With Linux 6.6
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...
KDE Plasma 6 & KWin See More Performance Tuning This Week
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...
Steam Survey Results For August Show A Linux Dip After A Very Exciting July
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...
Linux From Scratch 12.0 Published For Rolling Your Own Linux Build
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...
Wine 8.15 Released With Few Changes, 19 Bugs Fixed
Following the recent Wine summer holiday, Wine 8.15 is out today and back on track with the usual two-week release regiment...