Phoronix

While Ubuntu switched from LZ4 to Zstd for compressing its initramfs, they now are finding they were too aggressive in defaulting to Zstd with the highest compression level of 19. Due to speed and memory consumption concerns, they are looking at lowering their Zstd compression level...

AMD's Linux engineers continue preparing for next-gen EPYC server processors based on Zen 4 and supporting DDR5 memory...

The Cloud-Hypervisor open-source project started by Intel a few years ago as a Rust-written VMM focused on cloud workloads is now going to be hosted by the Linux Foundation...

Microsoft has introduced "Microsoft-Performance-Tools for Linux-Android" as a collection of open-source tools for analyzing system performance on Linux and Android...

When it comes to the state of packaged web browsers for Debian GNU/Linux, unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired at the moment and for those wanting to be secure and up-to-date it can mean resorting to proprietary or un-packaged browser builds...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is implementing emulated support for ETC2 texture compression to use with newer AMD GPUs to improve compatibility with Google's Android operating system...

Google is looking to upstream their Linux kernel driver for Open Profile for DICE, a secret derivation protocol used currently by some Android devices...

One of many exciting features/changes with upcoming Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors is the introduction of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). While initial AMX support is premiering with Linux 5.16 due out in stable form as the start of the new year, it currently doesn't allow for KVM virtualized guests to make use of the new capabilities...

While FreeBSD 13 is the current stable version of this leading open-source BSD operating system, FreeBSD 12.3 shipped today for their N-1 series...

While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too...

Back in September Intel originally posted Linux patches for "Software Defined Silicon" for being able to activate extra CPU features present in the processor's silicon but not exposed by default unless the cryptographically secure process with this SDSi driver was performed. Intel appears to be moving toward allowing licensable processor features that can be activated after the fact and today a new version of that SDSi Linux driver appeared...

AWS recently introduced Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form as the latest iteration of their Linux distribution now based on Fedora with various alterations to catering to their customers running it on EC2. Last week were benchmarks looking at Amazon Linux 2022 compared to Amazon Linux 2 and other distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu. In this article we are seeing how Amazon Linux 2022 can compete with Intel's own Clear Linux performance-optimized distribution.

Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!..

The Linux Foundation known for hosting numerous open-source projects and stewarding the Linux kernel, organizing countless events, and employing various LF Fellows such as Linux Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman has published their 2021 report...

The LLVM compiler infrastructure supports not only a growing number of CPU architectures but continues to lead when it comes to its support for different accelerators. Back in 2019 NEC was working to upstream their SX-Aurora VE "Vector Engine" Accelerator and now as of this week that target is considered officially supported upstream...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year...

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions...

Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline...

The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm's "Midgard" and "Bifrost" architectures while the newer "Valhall" architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway...

With Imagination Technologies having sold off what was MIPS Technologies several years ago and that CPU architecture having been abandoned now, Imagination today announced "Catapult" as their new family of RISC-V processor IP...