Phoronix

For those making use of the current Linux 6.3 stable series, Linux 6.3.9 is out today and it's particularly important if you make use of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel graphics driver...

Linux Mint as the popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu LTS releases and known for their Cinnamon desktop is out today with their 21.2 "Victoria" beta release for testing...

Red Hat announced today that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases...

Introduced with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors are various new accelerators available on select SKUs or via the Intel On Demand offering. One of the initial challenges there though is the early accelerator software support limitations and many upstream open-source (or even just widespread) software not yet enabled to make use of these new accelerators. One of the improvements on that front has been Intel engineers working on an IAA crypto compression driver for the kernel so that the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator can be transparently accessible to kernel features making use of the crypto API...

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project...

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs...

The LLVM Clang 17 C/C++ compiler when shipping later this year will now use OpenMP 5.1 as the default version of this multi-processing programming API...

With today's release of SDL 2.28 it also marks the SDL2 library entering maintenance mode for this open-source software that's relied upon by Valve and many cross-platform games...

Another feature scheduled to be sent in for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window is introducing support for provisioning primitives for thinly provisioned storage with the Device Mapper (DM) code...

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is poised to add support for Qualcomm's Adreno 690 GPU to the open-source MSM kernel graphics/display driver. The A690 is notably used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) platform that in turn is what's found inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop and other hardware...

As another feature on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel cycle is the large extent counts feature of the XFS file-system no longer being treated as "experimental" but is now considered safe to deploy...

Patches being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window prepare initial support for DEXCR that is found in recent Power ISA specifications...

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...