Phoronix

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window. The platform-drivers-x86 changes continue to primarily revolve around x86 Intel/AMD laptops but also some other desktop/platform drivers. Now in Linux 6.10 there is also a new "ARM64" sub-section of the platform drivers...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of the newest Fedora desktop ISO spin: Fedora Miracle...

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed...

It was just earlier this month that AMD Linux kernel graphics driver patches appeared for introducing a new ISP hardware block for Image Signal Processing with new AMD APUs. Already the AMDGPU ISP firmware has appeared in linux-firmware.git indicating that this "ISP" block may be coming in hardware quite soon if not already quietly found within some products...

It's not often having anything to write about on the Oracle Cluster File-System v2 (OCFS2), but with Linux 6.10 it's seeing a rather significant performance optimization...

As a small information heads up, the Linux 6.10 kernel will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time to the kernel log as a little helper...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.17.29377.6 is now available as the latest routine update to this open-source GPU compute stack used by the company's integrated and discrete graphics products for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute capabilities...

While Fwupd developers are working toward the Fwupd 2.0 release, out this morning is Fwupd 1.9.20 as the newest point release for this open-source solution for firmware updating on Linux that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet today sent out his feature pull request of all the new file-system code that is ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window...

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result...

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems...

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR...

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior...

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

SUSE/openSUSE has been busy crafting a next-gen Linux installer that is a web-based installer and originally known as D-Installer but now going by the name Agama...

The Linux Network File System (NFS) server code (NFSD) is seeing a new Netlink protocol introduced in Linux 6.10 as part of laying the groundwork for the new "nfsdctl" utility...

Niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM and heavy on the animations/effects. Out this morning is Niri 0.1.6 as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues providing the resources for various new GNOME desktop development initiatives. There are various efforts underway for new features and refinements with GNOME 47 in September and a renewed emphasis around GNOME OS...

The performance events updates were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. This pull adds support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and other new Intel CPU instructions to the x86 instruction decoder...

While machine check exception (MCE) events tend to be uncommon, a change made by Intel engineers is accommodating the ability in the Linux kernel to store more machine check records for "when things go seriously wrong" on increasingly high core count servers...