Phoronix

It's not only the Linux kernel that's been seeing some spring cleaning but Mesa developers have also been quite busy on working to remove some old, poorly maintained code from their open-source 3D driver components...

Following a rather eventful Linux 5.19 merge window the past two weeks, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc1. It's a great way coincidentally to mark the end of the Phoronix 18th birthday...

While just a day prior Linus Torvalds was questioning the proposed "HTE" subsystem, today on this final day of the Linux 5.19 merge window he decided to land this new subsystem...

It was eighteen years ago today that I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. Back then it was difficult getting peripherals working under Linux from 56k modems to printers and other components today where Linux support can just be assumed. Open-source graphics drivers back then were also in their infancy and lacking vendor support while NVIDIA was well regarded then for their proprietary driver being at least featureful and performant. It's been quite a journey...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent in the USB/Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.19 kernel that is seeing its merge window end today. With the USB updates, Greg had some remarks on the DWC3 Linux driver that will likely "never be finished" given that this USB IP is appearing in lots of hardware but not consistently being implemented and thus continuing to require a lot of adaptations on the driver side...

Last month Microsoft published their first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as an updated version of their in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes from Windows Subsystem for Linux to Azure. This week Microsoft released a rather hefty stable update to their CBL-Mariner 2.0 distribution...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 5.19 kernel. Char/misc continues to be the "catch all" area of the kernel for drivers and code not fitting formally within other kernel subsystems. Leading on this front for Linux 5.19 is the introduction of the Apple eFuse driver for M1 systems and Intel-owned Habana Labs continues improving their AI accelerator driver...

FEX-Emu 2206 has been released as the newest version of this user-space, open-source software for being able to run x86/x86_64 applications and games on AArch64 (Arm) hardware...

While there has been progress with the Mesa code targeting Apple M1 to run basic tests like glmark2, that has traditionally been an effort running under macOS with its kernel driver. This week the Asahi Linux crew celebrated their first rendered triangle running with a fully open-source driver stack under Linux...

Along with his other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted all of the staging area changes for the kernel in this "proving grounds" of sorts for the kernel. Thanks to some spring cleaning, the staging area is 13k lines of code less this cycle...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 7.10, Wine-Staging 7.10 is now available as the newest release of that experimental/testing flavor of Wine that ships with more than 500 extra patches...

Being submitted as a new subsystem for the almost wrapped up Linux 5.19 merge window is the Hardware Timestamping Engine "HTE" code. Linus Torvalds though has yet to pull in this new code and has raised concerns around some elements of it...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on all of the KDE development activities. In particular, for starting June the KDE developers have been very busy fixing bugs for Plasma 5.25 that is due to be released mid-June. While Plasma 5.25 is getting into good shape, they still could use more help from experienced developers in fixing more bugs...

It's been a busy day in the space for running Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine 7.10 was released as the newest bi-weekly development feature release while Valve and CodeWeavers also issued the release candidate for Proton 7.0-3 as the newest update to that Wine-based software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Following a mad dash this week to get the LoongArch CPU architecture support readied for Linux 5.19, Linus Torvalds successfully merged this MIPS64-inspired Chinese architecture code today into the mainline kernel. However, due to some of the code not yet passing review, while the CPU architecture code is in place some crucial drivers have yet to land and thus Linux 5.19 cannot boot on said hardware...

An open letter started by the Open-Source Firmware Foundation and seeking community support for this letter is calling on Intel to open-source their Firmware Support Package (FSP). The FSP binary blob has been a big limitation to the level of openness around firmware for Intel systems and has been a limiting factor in supporting the likes of Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and other technologies on Intel hardware...

A new patch series posted today by AMD is enabling peer-to-peer support within their AMDKFD kernel compute driver for allowing communication between multiple AMD GPUs over the PCIe bus without needing intermediate copies through system memory. In turn this should help with the multi-GPU compute performance for the Radeon ROCm stack...

A few days ago the RISC-V pull request landed in Linux 5.19 with support for RISC-V 32-bit (RV32) binaries on RV64, enabling the new Svpbmt extension, and other improvements. On Friday a secondary set of RISC-V changes were sent in for Linux 5.19 that includes adding the DeviceTree files for another new RISC-V board...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has gotten onto submitting his feature pull requests to Linux 5.19 for various areas of the kernel he oversees. With the driver core changes with this new kernel is now the ability to compress firmware files using the popular Zstd...

While SiFive has sadly shutdown production on the current HiFive Unmatched development board in order to focus on new products expected later this year, those with a SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board can enjoy seeing continued performance improvements with newer Linux distributions. Here is a look at the SiFive FU740 SoC performance under the recently released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS compared to the prior 21.10 and 20.04 releases.