Phoronix

This shouldn't be particularly surprising but the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel will likely be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

The media subsystem updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel have landed with new drivers and promotions for some of the existing image/video drivers...

A change now merged for Linux 6.1 will attempt to print the CPU core where a segmentation fault happens. The hope by printing the CPU/core where a segmentation fault happens is that over time trends may materialize with this information potentially being useful for helping to spot faulty CPUs...

Valve has worked their way through the pre-orders and ramped up the production of the Steam Deck to the point that the reservation queue is over. You can now order your Steam Deck today in-stock and Valve has also made available the much anticipated Steam Deck Dock docking station...

The networking feature pull for the Linux 6.1 kernel brings 127k lines of new code and 50k lines of code removed as a rather hearty set of wired/wireless networking driver updates and core improvements this round...

One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic...

Merged last month into Mesa 22.3 was Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D that is beginning to work with the open-source Radeon Linux driver, the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver, and others. This is also the first Rust-written component within the Mesa code-base. Karol Herbst of Red Hat who has led Rusticl development presented this week in Minnesota on this promising cross-vendor OpenCL implementation that may also support SYCL in the future...

Last week at Intel's Innovation conference the Intel Developer Cloud "DevCloud" was announced, while on the AMD side there is already something similar: the AMD Cloud Platform. At the tail end of 2021, AMD announced the Accelerator Cloud as a way for trying out the latest EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators complete with a pre-configured ROCm compute software stack. The AMD Cloud Platform is a currently parallel effort to the Accelerator Cloud with the former intended more for developers while the latter is more customer-oriented. After trying out the AMD Cloud Platform, it's indeed an easy way to evaluate the latest AMD data center wares while having a easy-to-deploy, pre-configured software environment.

The Arm SoC and platform enablement pull requests were sent out this morning that provide the Linux 6.1 kernel with support for several new SoCs, various platforms including some newer smartphones, and other hardware support improvements...

There are patches that provide support for ZRAM to be able to handle multiple compression streams on a per-CPU basis. This kernel module for creating compressed block devices could be made more versatile with this proposed patch series...

In addition to the excitement of the Arc Graphics A750 and A770, Intel has unveiled oneVPL 2022.2 as the newest version of this open-source video processing library that is their flagship video decode/encode library and related video processing toolkit as part of oneAPI...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai on Wednesday submitted all of the sound driver updates for Linux 6.1...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window. As usual, much of the interesting display/graphics driver work is happening within the open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers...

Taking place at the end of September in Mölndal, Sweden was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2022). While the event has now passed, the group has begun publishing the video recordings from the various sessions and many of the presentation slide decks are also available...

The real-time "RT" mainlining effort for the Linux kernel remains ongoing. While the finish line is coming near, PREEMPT_RT support for mainline still isn't over the last hurdle -- seemingly the main blocker it's still held up by are the printk changes with threaded console printing. But for the Linux 6.1 merge window there is at least more kernel code clean-ups...

Canonical announced today the launch of free personal Ubuntu Pro subscriptions for up to five systems...

Today the embargo lifts on reviews of the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards ahead of their retail availability set for next week. I've had the A750 and A770 at Phoronix the past week and today can share initial performance figures on these Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards under Linux with their open-source driver stack.

The x86/core changes for Linux 6.1 have been merged and are headlined by making sure an INT3 instruction is inserted after every unconditional Retpoline jump (JMP) for the Retpolines handling on both Intel and AMD processors...

The Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) changes for Linux 6.1 but with a documentation update does provide a good reminder for a public service announcement: run-time disabling of SELinux is deprecated and will be removed in the future...

Yesterday on the first day of the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022), Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team presented on the Vulkan mesh shader support being worked on for RADV...