Phoronix

Back in April AMD Linux engineers posted enabling a new CPU feature called Dynamic Boost Control to be found with some unspecified Ryzen SoCs for tuning the processor cores for optimal performance. The Dynamic Boost Control functionality depends upon the AMD Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) / Platform Security Processor (PSP) and this functionality was submitted today as part of the crypto updates for Linux 6.6...

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.5, GNU Linux-libre 6.5-gnu is now available for this downstream kernel maintained by the Free Software Foundation Latin America crew that removes support for binary-only kernel modules and stripping out other kernel code that depends on non-free-software microcode/firmware and other elements not deemed in the interests of pure free software...

Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a student developer took the initiative in working on an automated Gentoo Linux system updater to help begineers and ease the roll-out of security updates to users...

As part of the Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) updates submitted today for the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a quirk/workaround for dealing with current AMD Zen systems where a processor bug could lead to erroneously increased error severity and unneeded kernel panics...

In addition to the fchmodat2 system call, another early pull request submitted by Microsoft's Christian Brauner even before the Linux 6.5 kernel was released is one to introduce multi-grained timestamps with Linux 6.6. Multi-grained timestamps are intended to address an issue exhibited with NFS around caching and the current coarse-grained timestamp handling used for (in)validating caches...

While at the start of Linux 6.5 cycle Linus Torvalds was concerned this release "may be one of those releases that may drag out", in the end it is releasing today and right on schedule. Linux 6.5 was just published rather than going into overtime without any extra release candidate...

While Ampere Computing's wares with the Altra (Max) and forthcoming AmpereOne families of AArch64 server processors are designed for the data center, if you feel so inclined they have published a guide on being able to run Steam for Linux on these ARM64 processors -- including Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on these Linux servers...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 stable kernel being released there have already been a few pull requests submitted of new feature material for Linux 6.6. Among the early pulls for v6.6 is one from prominent Linux developer Christian Brauner at Microsoft that introduces the fchmodat2() system call as an evolution of fchmodat()...

The Flatpak open-source app sandboxing tech has merged support for the Wayland security context protocol...

While there are many exciting features with Linux 6.5 which will hopefully be released as stable later today, ahead for the imminent Linux 6.6 merge window are another hearty batch of new features set to be introduced...

While the release cycle dragged on for several extra months, available this weekend is the release of Mageia 9 for this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva that in turn was an evolution going back to the glorious Mandrake days. Mageia 9 is a nice update pulling in many package updates along with other fundamental changes like shifting to SQLite for its RPM package database...

While Linux 6.5 is expected for release tomorrow, the flow of last minute fixes isn't over...

LXD 5.17 is now available as the system container and virtual machine manager, which since last month has been reigned into control by Canonical and maintainership being limited to Canonical engineers. With this new LXD release there is ZFS delegation support as found with the upcoming OpenZFS 2.2...

Barring any last minute problems from coming up, the Linux 6.5 kernel is expected to be released as stable tomorrow, 27 August. Here's a reminder about all of the great changes and new features with this next kernel version, which is especially heavy on exciting additions for Intel and AMD Linux users...

In addition to GNOME's Sysprof integrating CPU scheduler data this week for GNOME 45, this system-wide profiling tool has also added support for FlameGraphs...

Last week KDE Plasma 6 made the default change from single click to double click for opening files/folders while this week brings another notable default settings change for the desktop... Tap-to-click is finally enabled by default...

AMD used the Gamescom gaming conference in Cologne, Germany for announcing the Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics cards as the newest consumer cards in the RDNA3 family.

Oliver Smith at Canonical who serves as the Product Manager for Ubuntu Desktop published a post on "charting a course for the future" of the Ubuntu desktop...

Since 2021 among other Snap'ing efforts for converting formerly Ubuntu DEB packages to Canonical's Snap sandboxed app packaging format has been the CUPS print server. The plan was to replace the Debian-packaged CUPS with the Snap-based CUPS for Ubuntu 23.10 but now that is being pushed back to next year...

It looks like the further-tuned AMD Inception / SRSO (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) mitigation code will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window...