Phoronix

CPU microcode updates are commonly done in the name of security fixes and resolving functionality issues.. In recent years, CPU microcode updates have been a much more common -- and important -- occurrence. While all modern CPUs rely on microcode it's just a matter of whether the version used is baked into the hardware or an updated version loaded by the BIOS or OS at boot time, a "vocal minority" of users are unhappy with CPU microcode being included in Libreboot ROMs. Thus moving forward there will be alternative builds of Libreboot for different motherboards with the CPU microcode stripped out in the name of software freedom...

If your newer desktop motherboard has a NCT6799D Super I/O controller or one of the variants like NCT6799D-S, the Linux 6.5 kernel is set to introduce support for this ASIC in order to expose hardware sensor support under Linux...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is preparing to land async buffered write support into the Linux kernel as another performance win for this flash-optimized file-system...

Red Hat engineers are working to deal with Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) being too costly for mitigating Spectre V2 and Retbleed on older Intel Xeon Scalable processors. A new patch has been floated to disable IBRS when idle and is working out well at least for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 while isn't clear yet if it will be accepted into the upstream kernel...

SVT-AV1 1.6 is now available as the latest version for this leading CPU-based AV1 encoder that is now enjoying 30~40% faster performance with high quality presets...

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle...

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code...

While the Linux 6.5 merge window isn't opening for another week, Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the pull request of the new Rust kernel code destined for this next kernel cycle...

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors...

Linus Torvalds took time out of his Father's Day to release Linux 6.4-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for this kernel that's likely to be officially released next weekend...

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result...

NVK as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver being developed for NVIDIA graphics hardware will hopefully see YCbCr format support this summer...

This month the FreeBSD project is celebrating its 30th anniversary since this open-source BSD operating system project was established...

Following yesterday's KDE weekly development summary, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published an update on the current state of affairs for KDE Plasma 6 along with when we may potentially see Plasma 6.0 actually released...

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has reaffirmed the company's commitment to the open-source ROCm compute stack and working with the community and ultimately improving their software support...

Some Fedora Enterprise Linux Next (ELN) plans were shared on Friday with the process of launching CentOS Stream 10 getting underway that will ultimately form the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10...

As a follow-up to yesterday's article about the believed fix for the Nouveau use-after-free bug plaguing Linux 6.3 users of this open-source NVIDIA driver, the fix has now been merged to Linux 6.4 Git and in turn should also be picked up for an upcoming Linux 6.3 point release...

Distrobox is the open-source project for quickly and easily firing up other Linux distributions as containers on your desktop. Distrobox is a delight to use if needing to try different Linux distributions on your system or wishing to leverage different distributions for specialized workloads...

It may be the middle of summer but there are no signs of Plasma 6.0 development efforts slowing down at all with this being another interesting week for KDE development...

Python 3.12 isn't even being released until October and Python 3.13 won't be out until H2'2024, but already the developers working on tuning CPython performance are aiming to make more enhancements this next development cycle...