Phoronix

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high-performance Java Virtual Machine formerly developed by IBM as the J9 VM...

Stemming from work done at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better handling hypervisor live updates, a "request for comments" patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list for Pkernfs. The Pkernfs proposal was first detailed publicly by AWS last year and is for persisting guest memory and kernel/device state safely across Kexec...

When it comes to making use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel, one of the areas where it makes a lot of sense is for the video codec drivers given the amount of unknown/untrusted data submitted by user-space for video processing and it being a wide attack surface for bad actors. With the memory safety features of Rust this can be a big benefit to such drivers and Collabora is currently experimenting with a virtual codec driver Rust implementation to prove the concept...

Overnight the latest fixes to the Linux 6.8 kernel were merged including two that are "serious" and will be back-ported to the existing stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well...

Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release...

Daniel Kiper with Oracle has provided a status update on current GRUB bootloader development activities, a look ahead, and plans for hopefully having out the next release in November...

When hearing of "Orange Pi Neo" this weekend from sources at FOSDEM 2024, I just assumed it was yet another Orange Pi single board computer... But then to hear it's a handheld game console from Orange Pi again gives off the impression of some low-power ARM device. It turns out though that the Orange Pi Neo is a forthcoming AMD Ryzen powered handheld gaming console...

Google is announcing today they are contributing $1M USD to the Rust Foundation to focus on enhancing interoperability between the C++ and Rust programming languages...

Last week the new AMD Ryzen 8000G series processors with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics became available in retail channels. The initial launch-day Linux testing was focused on the Ryzen 7 8700G processor, which showed great uplift for the integrated graphics over the Ryzen 5000G series with Vega/GFX9 graphics and the Ryzen 7000 series with their cut-down RDNA2 integrated graphics. In today's article the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G is the focus of the Linux testing along with an expanded set of comparison processors re-tested.

Ahead of any processors being released with support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and Advanced Vector Extensions 10 (AVX10), Intel's in-house Clear Linux distribution is already beginning to roll-out binaries compiled for APX+AVX10 use...

While the performance of LLVM/Clang is on-par with GCC these days on both x86_64 and AArch64 and the C/C++ support is very robust compared to many years ago, most Linux distributions continue using the GCC compiler and GNU toolchain by default. OpenMandriva is a well known Linux distribution that for several years has been a Clang-built Linux distribution while for three years now the Chimera Linux distribution has also been relying exclusively on an LLVM toolchain...

With PipeWire 1.0 having been released toward the end of last year and is now commonly used by Linux distributions out-of-the-box for managing audio/video streams, you may be wondering about the future plans for this open-source software from Red Hat. Well, Wim Taymans was at FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels and shared some of the plans ahead for PipeWire...

A pull request open for the past eight months for implementing a VOPD scheduler for the Valve-developed ACO "AMD Compiler" back-end has now been merged for Mesa 24.1-devel...

It's been just shy of four months since the Incus 0.1 release as a fork of the LXD project after Canonical re-asserted control over LXD last summer. Incus though is showing great potential and should be an interesting 2024...

Gentoo ended out last year by beginning to optionally provide binary packages for direct installation. This lowers the barrier for using Gentoo Linux and also works out well for low-end/embedded systems rather than always compiling source packages locally. They've now taken their binary position a step further by also offering up x86-64-v3 packages...

Linus Torvalds is up early today and already issued Linux 6.8-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel...

Cassia is an in-development effort for running Microsoft Windows desktop games on Android. This work-in-progress effort is essentially akin to the Steam Play approach but targeted for Android users by leveraging Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and then FEX for emulating x86_64 binaries on AArch64...

In addition to exploring low-latency changes for the "generic" kernel image, frame pointers by default, and possible x86-64-v3 optimizations, another area being invested into feature work for this next long-term support release is on the desktop provisioning side. Building off work of their new Ubuntu desktop installer and unifying the installation tech that has already been used by Ubuntu Server, Canonical is hoping for a nice desktop provisioning experience in facilitating automated installations, managed desktop setups within enterprises, and OEM/ODM deployments...

The AMD ROCm Debugger "ROCgdb" is maintained as a fork of the GNU Debugger (GDB) with support added for the heterogeneous debugging of the ROCm compute platform. ROCgdb works well and is distributed as part of the ROCM stack. The good news is that AMD is also working on getting this AMDGPU/ROCm debug support added into the upstream GDB debugger...

FreeBSD 14 has been out as stable since last November, but for those still on the FreeBSD 13 stable series, FreeBSD 13.3 beta was released this weekend ahead of its planned stable release in March...