Phoronix

As part of the VFS changes submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window, a new "BLK_DEV_WRITE_MOUNTED" Kconfig option is added that allows controlling whether writes are allowed to mounted block devices...

Ahead of the Linux 6.7 stable kernel release expected on Sunday, some early pull requests have already begun trickling in for the Linux 6.8 merge window to follow. The SLAB updates were sent to Linus Torvalds on Friday in preparing for this next kernel cycle...

The upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle will introduce support for Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) for use within KVM virtualized guests...

The Intel frame-buffer driver "IntelFB" has been solicited for removal from the mainline Linux kernel. This FBDEV driver is for supporting very old Intel i8xx/i9xx integrated graphics hardware...

Ahead of the Linux 6.7 kernel set to be released on Sunday, Red Hat's David Airlie has sent in some last minute fixes for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" DRM kernel driver. These fixes are for addressing fallout from the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware support merged for the v6.7 cycle...

AMD's open-source Linux software engineers continue preparing the Linux kernel for supporting next-generation Zen 5 processors...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on two separate change proposals for further enhancing the system security with the in-development Fedora 40 Linux to be released in April...

With some last minute fixes sent out today, the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel's AMDGPU driver will be in good shape for some upcoming AMD Radeon graphics hardware...

Last week I posted a number of fresh GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler performance benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX (Zen 4) system using the HP Z6 G5 A workstation running Ubuntu Linux. For those wondering about the performance of GCC vs. Clang generated binaries on something much more modest, here are some benchmarks when testing on a Meteor Lake laptop with the Core Ultra 7 155H.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, AMD announced today the Versal AI Edge XA Adaptive SoC and the Ryzen Embedded V2000A Series processor. The Ryzen Embedded V2000A is an x86 automotive-qualified processor family for next-generation automotive digital cockpits. Given the automotive/embedded focus, Linux plays a big role with the forthcoming hardware and its adoption by multiple automotive companies...

ARM11 MPCore support for the early ARMv6 multi-processor (SMP) support is set to be retired with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Ubuntu's install media (ISO) generation recently broke the assembly of source ISOs. These are the ISOs containing all of the source code packages to Ubuntu Linux with the original motivation of helping GPL license compliance and ensuring the code is easily accessible. But the usefulness in practice is limited and now instead Ubuntu developers are considering the discontinuing of source ISOs...

It's been over twenty years since the ATI Radeon R300 series was introduced but thanks to the open-source Mesa Gallium3D OpenGL driver, there continues to be new improvements made to this driver for these aging Radeon graphics cards on Linux. A few hundred lines of code were merged today for further enhancing the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver in 2024...

For those making use of the Newlib C standard library for embedded systems, Red Hat kicked off the new year by releasing Newlib 4.4...

AMD engineers are proposing an FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface to overcome current limitations of the Linux kernel's FPGA manager subsystem...

A release plan has been drafted for the upcoming GNU C Library "glibc" 2.39 release as well as some possible last minute changes...

The AMD Address Translation Library (ATL) is cleaning up and centralizing existing code within the Linux kernel for Zen-based systems. After being reviewed on the kernel mailing list, the AMD ATL is set to be introduced as part of the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Given the pace of hardware support and improvements these days, it's rather sad Linux Mint 21.3 continues to default to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel that is the non-HWE default of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for which the operating system is based. But at least Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are being rolled out to make Linux 6.2 easily available for those with newer hardware support requirements...

While years ago it was hard envisioning Microsoft contributing significantly to the Linux kernel or Mesa 3D graphics driver stack, maintaining its own in-house Linux distribution, or publishing so much open-source software, these days it's par for the course thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Linux dominating Azure instances, etc. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft continued investing in various Linux/open-source efforts that benefit their cause...

When it comes to new BSD milestones to look forward to in 2024, one of the big releases on deck is that of NetBSD 10.0 that has been in development since 2019. Now available for testing is the second release candidate of NetBSD 10...