Phoronix

This weekend the Linux 6.2 kernel will be released as stable. As it's been two months already since I published the Linux 6.2 feature overview following the closure of the v6.2 merge window, here is a reminder of what makes Linux 6.2 a really exciting kernel update...

In addition to Nouveau developers at Red Hat working on NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support to ease their kernel driver development and ideally leading to quicker upstream hardware support and finally tackling power management / re-clocking for newer GPUs, another important area on the open-source kernel driver side has been about re-architecting certain interfaces to be able to better support features for the Vulkan API...

The Lenovo ThinkPad X13s is one of the most interesting Arm-powered laptops at the moment with this laptop powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC, 13.3-inch 1920 x 1200 display, up to 32GB of RAM, up to 28 hour battery life, and current pricing starting below $1k USD. Upstream Linux support has been progressing around the ThinkPad X13s and it looks like Ubuntu has also been making some strides on easily supporting this Arm laptop...

Google engineer Yu Zhao known for his work on MGLRU has published a new patch series today that "significantly improves" the KVM guest performance when the host system is under heavy memory pressure...

Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) has been around for many years while with the recent shift to the oneAPI umbrella as oneTBB, in an effort to improve the usability and simplicity of the API they made a number of changes to its interfaces as well as having removed some previously common interfaces. This has led Fedora Linux to running on an older TBB version the past few years while for Fedora 39 later this year they are planning to modernize their Threaded Building Blocks packaging...

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code has added support for software-based decoding of Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) textures via compute shaders...

Hangover 0.8.1 was released today as the newest version of this open-source software project that leverages Wine and QEMU for being able to run Windows x86/x64 applications on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures...

Recently we finally received the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards for Linux testing from NVIDIA. For those that have been eager to see how the RTX 40 series hardware performs under Linux, here are my initial Linux gaming benchmarks featuring a variety of Linux native titles as well as with Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux atop Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton. The GeForce RTX 4080/4090 Linux performance is compared against a variety of other graphics cards including the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX with its open-source upstream Linux driver support.

AMD's GPUOpen team has published the source code for their FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2 update. This update brings improved image quality for more cases, integration enhancements, a new debug API checker, and other refinements over the earlier FSR2 code...

Vulkan 1.3.241 was published today with a range of fixes and clarifications, cleaning up of the XML schema, and also introducing three new Vulkan extensions...

The ACPI, thermal, and power management changes for Linux 6.3 have been submitted early due to traveling next week by ACPI/PM maintainer Rafael Wysocki. Most significant with the Linux 6.3 power management updates is adding of the AMD P-State Energy Preference Performance (EPP) mode for helping to deliver better performance and power efficiency for modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC systems on Linux...

While there has been much work on the Linux kernel's RISC-V CPU architecture support, a feature not tackled until now has been the Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) support for randomizing the kernel mapping to enhance system security...

These days the MIPS architecture is dead but eight years ago when the Raspberry Pi, the PandaBoard, and other early Arm single board computers were enjoying the limelight, Imagination Technologies decided to release the Creator CI20 MIPS SBC. It's been years since hearing of the CI20 or dusting off my CI20, but a new patch series this week tries to get the mainline Linux kernel to enjoy working WiFi and Bluetooth for this MIPS single board computer...

The Fedora Project has been working on drafting its strategic plan to help shape the Linux distribution over the next five years. A draft of the plan written up by the Fedora Council has been published and is currently seeking community feedback on their road-map planning...

The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future...

Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups...

After going through several release candidates the past few weeks, systemd 253 has officially shipped today as the newest version of this init system and service manager for Linux systems...

For the past few years Ubuntu developer Daniel van Vugt at Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering support for the GNOME desktop so that it will switch from double to triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in order to ultimately ramp up the GPU clock speeds / performance state in order to get back to delivering a fluid desktop experience. These triple buffering patches still haven't been upstreamed as of the GNOME 44 release due out next month, but the patches continue to be carried within Debian and Ubuntu among other distributions. An updated version of the code is now on the way to Debian and for April's Ubuntu 23.04 release...

Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.

A driver submitted for review that hopes to be included upstream in the Linux kernel enhances support for MSI laptops under Linux with more features being enabled...