Phoronix

One of the driver additions we've been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel that didn't pan out in time for the recently closed Linux 6.6 merge window is the Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver as a modern alternative to their i915 driver. The Xe driver better supports non-x86 CPU architectures, better designed and more performant around their modern integrated and discrete GPUs, and overall is able to make better design choices and improvements in being a clean sheet driver design compared to all the code that has built up in i915 over the years. But for getting the Xe driver upstream even in experimental form, first some necessary DRM scheduler patches need to be ironed out...

One of the new Linux networking features we've been looking forward to seeing in the kernel is TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO / RFC5925) as a means of improving TCP security and authenticity. The eleventh iteration of the TCP-AO patches were posted today for the Linux kernel with it looking like work on this network addition potentially wrapping up soon...

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the "PresentOptionAsyncMayTear" option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering...

The openSUSE Slowroll distribution is a middle-ground between the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution and the SUSE Linux Enterprise aligned openSUSE Leap with its fixed releases. The new openSUSE Slowroll is a rolling-release-like distribution with updates "every one or two months" but with constant bug/security fixes...

Sub-NUMA Clustering with Intel Xeon processors allows for splitting up the CPU cores, cache, and memory into multiple NUMA domains for enhancing the performance of NUMA-aware applications. While SNC can help in a number of cases especially plenty of HPC and server workloads, currently it's not properly supported if making use of Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel CPUs. That is in the process of changing with new Linux kernel patches being worked on by Intel...

KDE developer David Edmundson has written an interesting blog post looking at robustness improvements coming with Qt 6.6 via QtWayland compositor handoffs support...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's stellar Linux graphics/Proton team has released VKD3D-Proton 2.10 as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop Vulkan that allows for modern Windows games to run on Linux atop Steam Play...

With the Linux 6.6 merge window the cgroup changes brought one change worth mentioning...

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines...

The first release candidate of the inaugural GNU Boot has been released with users sought to try out this fork of Libreboot that in turn is derived from Coreboot...

The Linux 6.6 merge window is over as the period by which new features and improvements are added to the kernel. Linux 6.6-rc1 is out the door as the kernel developers and testing community begin stabilizing this next major Linux kernel release. With Linux 6.6 there are many exciting feature additions but also one notable addition that once again didn't make the cut...

In addition to all the open-source kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.6, merged this afternoon ahead of the Linux 6.6-rc1 tagging is merging of the DRM continuous integration (CI) code to hopefully lead to better testing of DRM subsystem/driver changes...

In addition to the EEVDF scheduler replacing the CFS code in Linux 6.6, another fundamental and interesting change with Linux 6.6 is on the workqueue (WQ) side with a rework that can benefit systems with multiple L3 caches like modern AMD chiplet-based systems...

With Linux 6.6 the KSMBD server is no longer "experimental" while this new kernel on the SMB3 client side also brings a notable addition: the new "dir_cache_timeout" option to control the cache time for directory contents...

Mike Blumenkrantz working for Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added implicit sync support to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, which in turn now opens this generic driver up for correctly providing GLAMOR rendering with X11 and XWayland environments...

While last week saw the main set of power management updates for the Linux 6.6 kernel, this week a follow-on pull request was submitted -- and merged -- with a few last minute additions...

More RISC-V architecture updates were merged this weekend for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window...

Merged overnight were the perf subsystem tooling updates for the Linux 6.6 merge window that is set to close later on Sunday...

The LoongArch CPU port is seeing a number of new kernel features enabled with Linux 6.6 as well as seeing some new hardware features wired up such as for Loongson Binary Translation (LBT) and allowing LSX/LASX instruction use in kernel-space...

Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its "experimental" marking...