Phoronix

Texinfo as the GNU typesetting syntax and the project's preferred documentation format is out with a major update...

Upstream Coreboot has phased out support for older AMD 14h / 15h / 16h series processors and associated motherboards...

Following my Core i5 13600K and Core i9 13900K Linux reviews for these new Raptor Lake processors, which were carried out under Ubuntu Linux, I've been carrying out my usual follow-up tests like looking at how well these new Intel CPUs are running under other distributions. To little surprise, Intel's own rolling-release Clear Linux distribution can offer some big-time improvements over a stock Ubuntu installation.

There has long been plans for supporting the Vulkan API with the Blender 3D modelling open-source software but there has been a lack of developers working on it. Fortunately, things are starting to (slowly) come together on Vulkan enablement for Blender...

With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX having been announced last week and set to ship on 13 December, it's down to crunch time for ensuring that the open-source Linux driver support is in shape. Unlike on the Windows side where it's just expected of the user to navigate to AMD.com and download a convenient driver installer, on Linux that's not exactly the case. AMD will likely have their Radeon Software for Linux driver package on their website but that is limited in scope to their few supported enterprise/LTS Linux distributions supported, while most gamers/enthusiasts will be left wondering about the Linux kernel and Mesa versioning requirements...

An ugly hack within the Linux kernel that has been in mainline for over three years has been called out. Due to a buggy X.Org Server / xf86-video-modesetting DDX, the Linux kernel has been imposing different behavior on whether a process starts with "X" and in turn disable the atomic mode-setting support...

With next-generation Meteor Lake CPUs the integrated graphics are set to have native HDMI 2.1 display capabilities. Intel's open-source Linux kernel driver has begun those HDMI 2.1 preparations and sent out today were early patches for enabling HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL)...

Intel compiler engineers continue being very busy working to land as much of the new CPU feature support as they can into GCC 13 for what is the next annual compiler release that will debut as GCC 13.1 in the early months of 2023...

Debuting on Sunday was Meson 0.64 as the newest version of this open-source build system that is increasingly being used by a variety of software projects for its speed, good cross-platform support, and overall feature set compared to alternatives...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.1-rc4 as the latest weekly test release for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

Future Intel CPUs and some existing processors via a microcode update will support a new feature called the Asynchronous EXit (AEX) notification mechanism to help with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave security. Patches for the Linux kernel are pending for implementing this Intel AEX Notify support with capable processors...

Along with the likes of OBS Studio adding NVENC AV1 support for enjoying GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the widely-used FFmpeg library has merged its support for NVIDIA NVENC AV1 video encoding...

Last month Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede warned that old and "weird" laptops could see broken backlight controls with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel. He issued a call for testing and as a result was provided valuable feedback that led to some new fixes now on the way. But there still is more work ahead and he's requested further testing by Linux laptop users to ensure the reworked backlight handling is in good shape...

Made public earlier this year was Spectre-BHB / BHI as a speculative execution vulnerability similar to Spectre V2 and affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. At the time Neoverse N2 / N1 / V1 and older cores like Cortex-A15 / A57 / A72 were known to be vulnerable and required software mitigations. The upcoming AmpereOne is also vulnerable to Spectre-BHB and has a patch now on its way to the Linux kernel for mitigating this Spectre class vulnerability...

"BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY" is on the way for the Linux 6.2 kernel for dealing with some issues that originally turned up within Facebook's data centers where they were seeing routine out-of-space transaction aborts. With BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY, Btrfs will try harder to avoid aborted transactions when running out of space...

As an enhancement to the out-of-the-box Linux kernel in its default x86_64 configuration, it was being eyed to enable Indirect Branch Tracking by default. That change to enable IBT by default has been picked up by TIP's x86/core branch, thus putting it on deck as material for submitting with next month's Linux 6.2 merge window...

LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit...

AMD on Friday submitted a new round of patches for AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates they have ready for the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

This summer AMD began posting Linux kernel patches for Quality of Service "QoS" features with new AMD CPUs. Sent out on Friday were the newest iteration of these QoS extension patches around SMBA and BMEC with these features likely premiering on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors...

It's Saturday morning and that means there is a new weekly blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham about the prominent desktop changes that occurred this week...