Phoronix

The GNU C Library "glibc" is the latest free software project to adopt a Code of Conduct (CoC) in aiming to encourage welcoming behavior and less controversy among developers and other stakeholders when engaging this key component to the Linux software ecosystem...

Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that they will now enable frame pointers by default when building packages. There will still selectively be some packages where they decide to disable frame pointers due to the performance overhead, but the focus on this change is to improve the out-of-the-box debugging and profiling support on the Linux distribution...

The X.Org Server doesn't see much in the way of feature work these days with Red Hat and others divesting from classic X.Org/X11 sessions. But there continues to be new point releases of the X.Org Server and the XWayland code due to long-standing security issues within the X.Org codebase. New point releases were out last night due to two CVEs for bugs dating back to 2007 and 2009...

LibreOffice 24.2 Beta 1 is available today as the latest test candidate for this cross-platform open-source office suite that is packing many new features while also changing its approach to versioning...

FreeRDP 3.0 stable was released today as this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for allowing nice remote access support...

A few months ago I wrote about AMD Linux engineers working on ACPI PHAT support for the Linux kernel. This week new patches around Linux ACPI PHAT handling have been posted with further confirmation of this functionality coming to "future" AMD SoCs...

With Intel's very timely upstream Linux hardware support going back years, they typically start on the upstream hardware enablement well in advance of the product's planned public launch. On a number of occasions this has meant adding support to the Linux kernel for hardware that never ends up being released to consumers. There's been recent cases like the Thunder Bay support that was dropped from the kernel after it became clear that the SoC would never ship to now a more extreme case of a driver being in the mainline kernel for 15 years to support never-released hardware...

The Linux kernel's thermal driver has the obvious notion of hot and critically-hot trip points while to this point there hasn't been the opposite: cold trip points (events) but that's finally been proposed as we approach the end of 2023...

SVT-AV1 v1.8 was released this week as the newest version of this open-source AV1 video encoder originally started by Intel and continues to be developed by Intel engineers in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media. As with most releases, optimizing this CPU-based AV1 encoder's performance continues to be a key priority...

Canonical is experimenting with x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels! They have produced an experimental build of Ubuntu Server using x86_64_v3 for requiring basically Intel and AMD CPUs with AVX capabilities. But they aren't yet committing to it as a default or when such a change may materialize...

Since the release of the Threadripper 7000 series on 20 November I've carried out and published many benchmarks of these new HEDT/PRO CPUs including the flagship AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX featuring 96-cores / 192-threads. All of my Threadripper PRO 7995WX benchmarks have been carried out using an HP Z6 G5 A workstation and it's proven to be an outright beast for creators, software developers, and others needing immense multi-threaded capabilities at your finger tips. Here's more about my experience with this new high-end HP workstation.

Red Hat engineers have been developing Initoverlayfs as a scalable initial file-system. The code is currently in early form and the developers are still looking for feedback from the community as well as figuring out whether it properly belongs in kernel or user-space...

Following Canonical pulling on control of LXD and maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, LXD 5.20 was released today where they have also decided to change its license moving forward to AGPLv3 by default...

ONNX in collaboration with AMD have announced TurnkeyML as a new open-source machine learning toolchain focused on agile model development and deployment...

With Linux 6.7 there's now support for enabling/disabling 32-bit program support at boot-time. The "ia32_emulation=" argument can be used for enabling/disabling 32-bit user-space program support and the ability to support 32-bit system calls. Right now when forcing off the x86 32-bit support it can be confusing if the user is unaware as no warning is currently provided, but that is about to change...

The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project...

Linux 6.6 brought an initial Intel Visual Sensing Controller "IVSC" driver. The Intel IVSC drivers have long been out-of-tree for use with Alder Lake laptops and newer. Linux 6.7 brought the La Jolla Cove Adadpter driver code as part of the IVSC controller. With Linux 6.8 there's yet more work landing on the IVSC front...

Cling 1.0 was released this week for this open-source interactive C++ interpreter that builds atop LLVM/Clang. Cling is implemented as an extension to LLVM/Clang to serve as an interpeter leveraging the read-eval-print loop (REPL) concept and relies on just-in-time (JIT) compilation...

The feature work continues pouring in for Mesa 24.0 with new OpenGL and Vulkan driver features continuing to be enabled...

Of the many new features in Linux 6.7, one of the items exciting Phoronix readers the most is the merging of the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system...