Phoronix

Following the one week delay to the release schedule, Linus Torvalds issued the Linux 5.17 stable release a short time ago...

AMD quietly posted a new version of its instruction set architecture documentation concerning its Instinct MI200 accelerator. AMD originally published the ISA documentation for the MI200 back in November but it seems to have gone unnoticed (including by me) while in February they went ahead and released a new version of that technical documentation...

The Linux Mint crew have today released Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 (LMDE5). This is the effort carried out as a safeguard should Linux Mint in the future determine it unsuitable to continue basing their flagship distribution atop Ubuntu...

In addition to the IO_uring updates for Linux 5.18, block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has also submitted the core block and driver changes ahead of the v5.18 merge window opening tonight following the release of Linux 5.17...

AMD's Radeon Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy working on their upcoming GPU support...

It was just last week Microsoft issued a new monthly update to CBL-Mariner, its Linux distribution within use at the Windows company for tasks ranging from Azure to WSL. Now a second update for March has arrived for CBL-Mariner with security fixes and a few other updates...

Fish 3.4 is out as the newest version of this popular shell particularly among enthusiasts/hobbyists...

The Linux 5.17 kernel will be released tomorrow and in turn that will kickoff the start of the Linux 5.18 merge window. Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has already begun submitting his feature pull requests for this next kernel, including the IO_uring updates...

The Intel-led Sound Open Firmware project for providing open-source firmware for newer Intel audio hardware and even support for some AMD audio hardware is nearing its v2.1 release...

The recent work around Lavapipe picking up many new Vulkan extensions is culminating with Vulkan 1.3 support for this CPU-based Vulkan software implementation...

Even amid the ongoing war, KDE developers remain quite productive and continuing to push ahead for furthering this open-source desktop environment...

The Asahi Linux project for running Linux on Apple Silicon (currently the Apple M1 SoCs) is out with its first official alpha release...

It's arguably long overdue, but landing today within Mesa 22.1 is support in the V3D driver for Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality. By adding this shader cache to V3D it can help with the performance of this Gallium3D open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer single board computers...

The much anticipated dav1d 1.0 open-source AV1 video decoder has been released! Dav1d 1.0 is a big update to this leading CPU-based AV1 decoder that now offers AVX-512 support for newer Intel CPUs, threading enhancements, and more...

While AMD EPYC processors offer phenomenal performance at the high-end for servers with up to 64 cores / 128 threads per socket, eight memory channels, and other features, not all server deployments call for such capabilities. In the lower-end dedicated web server rental space, budget web hosting, and similar personal / small office server space, AMD Ryzen processors can prove more than capable. Already some dedicated server providers are offering AMD Ryzen powered servers and more are expected to come soon -- especially with even more server-minded wares for Ryzen expected next generation. In looking at this space, we have been testing a number of AMD Ryzen processors recently compared to Intel Xeon E class competition for looking at the performance and value in the low-end dedicated server space.

Mesa has long had the OpenCL "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker that has supported OpenCL 1.x but lacked important extensions that impaired its practicality. With AMD backing their ROCm compute stack in more recent years and Intel going with their Compute-Runtime stack for oneAPI and OpenCL support, there also isn't a major backer to Clover besides Red Hat engineers and the community. Now though "Rusticl" has been published as a new Mesa OpenCL implementation written in the Rust programming language...

A small but important change was just merged into GCC 12 ahead of its upcoming release in a month or so and also the same patch back-ported now for the GCC 11 stable series...

Last week marked the release of FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 1 with many changes in particular benefiting this BSD OS on POWER and RISC-V hardware. Out today is the latest beta release...

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has recently been spearheading many improvements to the Linux kernel's random number generator (RNG) code and building off the work found in Linux 5.17, the Linux 5.18 kernel will bring a lot more on this front...

Miguel Ojeda who has been leading the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel today posted his fifth spin of this patch series providing the optional Rust integration for the Linux kernel that includes example driver code...