Phoronix

At the start of April there were the Steam Survey results for March 2023 that showed a 0.54% dip to the marketshare. With that were als some strange shifts in the Windows 10 vs. 11 marketshare as well as a big boost to the Chinese marketshare. The March numbers were not revised but with the start of May comes the April numbers... Showing a boost to Linux and largely recovering from the April anomaly...

Last November ClamAV 1.0 was released for this anti-virus/anti-malware solution currently developed via Cisco and the open-source community. Following ClamAV 1.0 LTS, today marks the availability of ClamAV 1.1 as the first post-1.0 feature release...

AMD has begun publishing ROCm 5.5 source packages for the Radeon Open eCosystem components making up their GPU compute stack that is also being extended to cover Xilinx products and more...

Red Hat organized an HDR hackfest to bring together all the Linux desktop stakeholders around the desktop, display drivers, and related infrastructure for helping to make progress on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support. The event took place last week at Red Hat's Brno office in the Czech Republic and sounds like it was quite a success...

Since last November has been a kernel bug report from a Canonical engineer after finding that the Intel Thunderbolt USB controller on various laptops was "dead" after resuming the system. That problem is now resolved with Linux 6.4 and this generic fix may end up helping other hardware as well...

While there is already Fedora Silverblue as a Fedora Workstation variant leveraging RPM-OSTree for creating an ummutable OS image and Fedora Kinoite as a KDE-based alternative, Fedora Onyx has been proposed as a new immutable variant of Fedora Linux...

With Linux running on everything from tiny single board computers with basic WiFi or Ethernet networking up through massive super-computer clusters, the Linux networking subsystem continues seeing immense improvements each kernel cycle. With Linux 6.4 the networking changes are heavy from new hardware support (including Apple M1 Pro/Max WiFi!) to continued work around WiFi 7 support as well as never-ending work on performance optimizations...

Intel's open-source "cartwheel-ffmpeg" project is their repository where they collect all of their FFmpeg patches prior to upstreaming. While the patches have been available in Git form, prior to the weekend Intel released their 2023Q1 queue of patches to this widely-used, open-source multimedia library...

Near the start of 2022 engineers out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center posted Linux driver patches for their Gunyah hypervisor. Gunyah is an open-source type-1 hypervisor developed by Qualcomm with an emphasis on security and other features. More than one year later the Gunyah drivers have yet to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel but work on them persists...

Merged last week for the Linux 6.4 kernel were all of the VirtIO and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (VDPAU) changes. Interesting from that pull request is delivering a big performance bump for VDUSE...

In recent years Linus Torvalds hasn't had the time to write too much original new code for the Linux kernel himself with these days mostly managing developers, providing insightful mailing list posts, and reviewing code for merging into the kernel tree along with related tasks. For Linux 6.4 though he did manage to write up some new code...

During this month on Phoronix were 242 news articles on Phoronix with original content each and every day presented by your's truly around open-source and Linux. April was interesting with the release of Linux 6.3, all of the exciting Linux 6.4 features merged so far, AMD introducing openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization with support for Coreboot and similar firmware solutions, Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 23.04 being released, and much more...

It sure doesn't feel like it's already been five years since Huawei announced EROFS as a read-only file-system initially designed for Android devices but has proven useful in the mainline Linux kernel to Linux users at large with interesting use-cases also coming up around containers and more. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel are yet more improvements to this read-only file-system...

Back in 2021 AMD began preparing Linux kernel support for 5-level paging support with their future processors and building off the prior 5-level page table kernel support established by Intel. That was followed by AMD enabling 5-level page table support with KVM SVM in the Linux 5.15 kernel. AMD CPUs with 5-level page table support since launched in the form of 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors. One piece only now coming together though is AMD IOMMU driver support for 5-level guest page table support...

While prominent gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer still is not officially supporting Linux with their vast array of products, thanks to the community-driven OpenRazer project there is unofficial open-source support and can work quite well when paired with the likes of Polychromatic as a nice user interface. Out today is OpenRazer 3.6 in enabling the latest Razer products on Linux...

With the work led by Intel engineers on bringing up the Compute Express Link specification features into the open-source kernel, Linux 6.4 is another cycle seeing a lot of enablement work on the CXL front...

The HID subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 6.4 kernel that is now half-way through its merge window...

With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software...

On Friday the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted a pull request of new Rust feature code for the Linux 6.4 kernel...

Since 2020 Intel engineers have been working on Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a feature similar to Arm's Top Byte Ignore (TBI) for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. This can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. The Intel LAM kernel support has finally been merged with Linux 6.4...