Phoronix

While Linux 6.1 added the initial Rust infrastructure as an alternative programming language for writing new kernel modules, so far as of Linux 6.5 much of the upstreaming effort has been around adding new abstractions and supporting additional subsystems for making the Rust capabilities in the kernel more complete. The latest patch series is working on adding Rust abstractions for networking sockets and other fundamental networking bits...

In addition to all the interesting open-source graphics driver updates coming with Linux 6.6 like AMD FreeSync Panel Replay, Nouveau uAPI additions for NVK, Intel PSR for old laptops, and many other GPU driver changes, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem with its AI accelerator "accel" framework/subsystem is rolling out initial support for the VPU4 coming with Intel Lunar Lake processors...

Released last week was Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.40 as the latest feature update to this high performance JVM that focuses on being optimized for a small footprint...

Following last week's AMD Inception vulnerability another AMD Zen CPU bug came to light and that was performing a divide by zero on Zen 1 could end up leaking data with this DIV0 speculation bug. The original workaround was performing a dummy division 0/1 within the #DE exception handler but that's now turned out to be inadequate...

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.5-rc6 kernel a few hours early today after capping off a busy week...

The Bcachefs file-system continues to work its way toward the mainline kernel while interestingly this weekend a Valve developer posted patches for implementing case-folding (case insensitive) feature support for this open-source file-system...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver ray-tracing support is about to become much faster with a pending improvement that is currently undergoing review...

Last month the Mold 2.0 high-speed linker was released that shifted from AGPL to MIT licensing after their monetization strategy didn't pan out. This weekend the project is out with its Mold 2.1 release as another step forward for this alternative linker to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

Future LibreOffice releases will finally better handle animated PNG (APNG) files. After initial import support was added back in June, merged this week was initial export support for APNG files...

Intel engineer and open-source compiler expert H.J. Lu has landed a much faster log2() implementation within the GNU C Library (glibc) that makes use of FMA instructions with modern x86_64 CPUs...

AMD submitted more "new stuff" for their AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute drivers for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle...

Last month when the Linux kernel was mitigated for Zenbleed as a CPU vulnerability affecting AMD Zen 2 processors, it turns out the Steam Deck APU was accidentally left without coverage. An x86/urgent pull request sent out today for the Linux 6.5 kernel and for back-porting to current stable Linux kernel releases will extend the Zenbleed mitigation to protect Steam Deck gamers...

Last year the DisplayPort 2.1 specification was published and now Intel's open-source Linux engineers are working on adding support to the kernel for handling of the DisplayPort Alternate Mode 2.1 support for that DP operation over USB Type-C connections...

One of the new Linux kernel patch series out of AMD this week is for exposing ACPI PHAT, the Platform Health Assessment Table...

While KDE developers are busy working on Plasma 6, System76's software developers are busy working on their new Rust-based "COSMIC" desktop environment. System76 on Friday published a new blog post outlining their efforts in recent weeks...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on Plasma 6 development and related enhancements to this popular open-source desktop environment...

With the in-development NVK driver merged for Mesa 23.3 to provide open-source NVIDIA Vulkan API support when paired with the Nouveau kernel driver and the necessary Nouveau kernel driver improvements coming with Linux 6.6 for supporting this driver, Phoronix readers have been eager for some benchmarks... Well, here are some benchmarks on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series when comparing the latest NVK+Nouveau code compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.

Following the new Linux stable kernels this week to quickly mitigate the Intel Downfall and AMD Inception vulnerabilities, today brings another set of stable point releases. Among the fixes to be picked up since Tuesday is the other AMD fix for the week of a Zen 1 bug that could leak data following a divide by zero operation...

The upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel will finish removing old remnants of Wireless USB support...

Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14...