Phoronix

The Steam Survey results are in for May 2022 and while it shows Linux slightly down on a percentage basis, it shows a new top-spot for the most popular Linux distribution unseating Ubuntu LTS...

Last month marked the debut of Mesa 22.1 as the newest quarterly release to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack. For those that prefer waiting until the first point release before upgrading, today is the day with Mesa 22.1.1 now available...

The Kernel Recipes 2022 conference kicked off today in Paris, France. Kicking off the event was Linux block subsystem maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe to talk about all of the recent and ongoing work around this major advancement to Linux I/O in recent years...

Google has been helping small open-source projects get started in chip fabrication with Google covering the costs and partnering with SkyWater Technology using their open-source process design kit (PDK). While the chip manufacturing is done on a 130nm process (SKY130), this effort has proven to be a big success for open-source hardware projects with limited funding and Google today announced a new silicon design portal...

Back in February Intel announced it was acquiring Linutronix as the folks maintaining real-time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) and other prominent Linux contributions. Today Intel announced another exciting software acquisition for bolstering their open ecosystem...

While Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was just released over one month ago, it is shipping on the Linux 5.15 kernel that was already two stable series behind at release time but chosen as the default due to its long-term support status. Ubuntu 22.04 also shipped with Mesa 22.0 as the latest stable version albeit the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers are quick to advance. So if you've been thinking about upgrading Mesa or the Linux kernel on your Ubuntu 22.04 system for better Linux gaming performance, here are some benchmarks looking at such performance impact for AMD RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics.

New feature code for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has landed for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel...

For ending out the month of May the Genode open-source operating system framework developers published a new feature release of their software as they advance both the framework itself and the Sculpt OS general purpose operating system...

On Tuesday the RISC-V architecture changes were merged into the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel with several new features in tow...

Various hypervisors expose support for the XSAVEC instruction as an XSAVE with compaction as an efficiency optimization. However, the Linux kernel doesn't currently make use of XSAVEC as an alternative to XSAVES (supervisor mode) but that is now changing with Linux 5.19...

Word of NVIDIA working on an open-source kernel driver with hopes of eventually being mainlined and being of better quality than Nouveau topped the Linux news for the past month. Plus the introduction of Amazon's new Graviton3 processors, the debut of Fedora 36 and SteamOS 3.2 among other distribution updates, and Linux 5.19 development getting underway all made for an interesting month of May...

It was just March of last year that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) served up a total of 25 million firmware downloads to Linux users for updating their system firmware and peripheral devices supporting Fwupd. Just over one year later it has successfully served more than 52 million downloads!..

Intel is using ISC 2022 this week in Hamburg, Germany to provide an update on their Super Compute Group road-map and the efforts they are pursuing both in hardware and software for a sustainable, open HPC ecosystem.

Following the NVIDIA R515 Linux driver beta from earlier this month that was published alongside NVIDIA's open kernel driver announcement, today the NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux driver has been released as the first R515 stable release...

GNOME's Mutter compositor has been going through some code restructuring and preparations for being able to build it without any X11 dependencies at all, for those wanting a legacy-free/X11-free GNOME desktop experience that would also forego any XWayland support...

While the just talked about Nouveau beginning to land GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" open-source support is exciting, as mentioned there still are hurdles to overcome for having good open-source NVIDIA driver performance on modern GPUs. So equally exciting news is that Nouveau has begun adapting some of their code into a standalone library so it can be used in the future by other new driver(s)...

Early bits of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" support were merged today into Mesa 22.2...

Back during the Linux 5.18 merge window in March I wrote about a big NUMA benchmark performance regression I noticed and bisected. It turns out there has been a fix for it in patch form albeit I only noticed this weekend and now was able to successfully test and verify the fix. That fix is now working its way to the mainline kernel...

Mozilla Firefox 101 is officially meeting the world today. One week after Google's Chrome 102, it's now time for Mozilla's new monthly update on the Gecko side with Firefox 101...

The NFS server (NFSD) changes have been merged into the Linux 5.19 kernel and a new feature this cycle is supporting the NFSv4 "Courteous Server" functionality...