Phoronix

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing...

IO_uring continues to prove itself to be one of the most exciting fundamental innovations to the Linux kernel of the past decade. While started for async storage I/O, it has seen recent work around networking use-cases and also driving other innovations like the new "UBD" driver for a IO_uring-based user-space block driver. It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IO_uring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is io_uring_spawn...

TrenchBoot is the project backed by Oracle and other stakeholders for providing a boot-time integrity framework that builds upon boot integrity technologies and roots of trust for ensuring system integrity, network attestation launch, and other security use-cases...

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.4 was published this morning and significant with this new open-source Vulkan driver version is finally seeing ray-tracing support from this driver...

A new open-source driver has been posted for supporting the WMI interface found with newer Dell systems. This platform driver allows for reading battery properties like the temperature and IDs as well as additional fan/thermal sensor information...

Held today during the first day of Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin was a Rust mini-conference about the ongoing work on making Rust a suitable systems programming language and integrating support for Rust within the mainline Linux kernel. There were many interesting talks from the status of the Rust integration from the Linux kernel to a Rust-written NVMe driver that can perform as well as the C written driver...

Google for quite some time now has been working on "Ghost" as a means of controlling the Linux kernel scheduler from user-space and/or eBPF programs. Ghost provides an extensive API so developers can alter the kernel's scheduler behavior from user-space or eBPF and fine-tune the scheduling behavior based on system preferences...

Since NTFS3 was mainlined last year in the Linux kernel as a modern NTFS read/write file-system driver developed by Paragon Software, it's mostly just been some fixes since then and other minor updates. A new NTFS3 patch series sent out today is at least preparing a new feature for this kernel driver...

One of many changes to find with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release is Debuginfod integration...

Now that Ubuntu 22.10 is into its feature freeze and its Linux 5.19 based kernel landed as well as moving to the GCC 12.2 compiler, I've begun testing this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release on more systems. For the current-flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors, Ubuntu 22.10 does deliver some performance advantages over the current Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS release. However, Ubuntu 22.10 still trails in a distance behind Intel's own Clear Linux platform for the most aggressive out-of-the-box performance.

The PyTorch Foundation has been formed under the Linux Foundation umbrella by Meta (Facebook), AMD, AWS, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to focus on providing the leading-edge AI framework...

A number of improvements to the XPad input driver are slated to be included with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel to better handle the Microsoft Xbox controllers and other derivative designs...

Karol Herbst of Red Hat has seen his new "Rusticl" implementation merged into mainline Mesa! Mesa 22.3 next quarter will introduce this new Rust-written OpenCL 3.0 implementation that will hopefully be more successful than the existing Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL driver...

David Rheinsberg of Red Hat who is a contributor to systemd, BUS1, KMSCON, and other projects over the years is leading an effort seeking to get Rust's UEFI firmware targets promoted to a tier-2 class...

Added to the mainline Linux kernel last year was a Aquacomputer HWMON driver for initially supporting the German company's water-cooling pump under Linux with access to the fan speed, power, voltage, current, and coolant temperature. Since then that open-source driver developed by the community has been extended to cover an Aquacomputer fan controller and different models. For the Linux 6.1 cycle coming up there are more additions to the Aquacomputer driver...

Last week Laminar Research promoted X-Plane 12 to its early access public beta phase. This realistic flight simulator continues to natively support Linux -- and doing so well for many years -- and now with X-Plane 12, the Vulkan steps up past their long-used OpenGL renderer...

The Linux Plumbers Conference has returned to being an in-person event and is running today through Wednesday in Dublin, Ireland...

Linus Torvalds has just announced Linux 6.0-rc5 as the latest test release of Linux 6.0 that is working its way toward a stable release in early October...

Disclosed back in March was the Spectre-BHB / Branch History Injection (BHI) speculative execution vulnerability that on the Arm side affected CPUs from the likes of the Spectre-A15 through A78 series as well as the likes of the X1, X2, and A710, plus the Neoverse E1 / N1 / N2 / V1 CPUs. Now for Linux 6.1, a command-line option is being added for ARM64 to be able to disable the Spectre-BHB mitigation due to the "great impact" to performance...

For those recently picking up an ASUS laptop powered by AMD Ryzen Mobile 6000 series "Rembrandt" SoCs or considering such a device, AMD has prepared a set of fixes for the suspend-to-idle support...