Phoronix

IO_uring creator and Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe spent about five minutes working on two patches to implement caching for issue-side time querying in the block layer and can yield 6% or more better I/O performance...

A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language. His early results are interesting and hopeful around the potential of a Rust-based scheduler that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time...

Merged back at the start of the Linux 6.8 merge window were the VFS mount API updates that introduce two new system calls: statmount() and listmount() for reading more detailed information about file-system mounts...

It was in 2013 a security researcher called the X.Org Server security state "worse than it looks" and quite a disaster from the security/bug perspective for the aging codebase. A decade later there's still no shortage of security vulnerabilities being uncovered within the X.Org Server...

If you are looking for a 5U rack-mountable chassis for a high-end server or workstation, the SilverStone RM51 launched a few months ago as their latest offering in the high-end server enclosure space.

As the first new tagged version of AMD's AOMP LLVM-based OpenMP-focused compiler for offloading to their Instinct / Radeon GPUs, AOMP 18.0-1 was released today with many changes...

Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner that is used for a variety of purposes from Azure to WSL has seen its first release of 2024. While the distribution has at times released up to a few new versions per month, there hadn't been a new release since late November given the holidays...

SQLite 3.45 was released today with the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ optimization being enabled by default that can help for apps relying on SQLite and doing a lot of reads of large BLOBs or strings deliver better read performance. There are also query planner improvements while most interesting with SQLite 3.45 is all JSON functions being rewritten to use the new JSONB format...

In addition to the GNOME triple buffering patches that still haven't been merged to Mutter's mainline branch, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upstream Debian are slated to currently carry a few extra performance optimizations...

While not as notable as the Bcachefs additions, more work on XFS online repair, and other file-system updates for Linux 6.8, the Btrfs file-system driver changes for Linux 6.8 were merged last week...

Libvirt as the virtualization API/toolkit developed by Red Hat for managing virtualization on Linux is out today with its v10.0 release...

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but openSUSE today reaffirmed that openSUSE Leap 16 will succeed the current Leap 15 series. OpenSUSE Leap 16 will be based on SUSE's Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) codebase...

Embark Studios' The Finals free-to-play first person shooter has proven quite popular since its release in early December. The Finals is a game powered by Unreal Engine 5 that has been running on Linux thanks to Valve's Steam Play (Proton + VKD3D-Proton). With the latest Mesa driver activity, Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with their open-source driver can now handle this popular game...

Merged last week to the mainline kernel were all of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem driver updates for the Linux 6.8 cycle, which includes introducing the Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO driver...

Tom Stellard announced plans this past week for releasing the LLVM 18 compiler stack in early March...

KDE e.V. as the German legal organization behind the KDE project is hiring an employee for a new project to promote environmentally-sustainable software and long-term hardware use...

Prior to Linus Torvalds' Internet and electricity being knocked out by a snow storm and thus impacting the Linux 6.8 merge window, his weekend was already in rough shape due to encountering a performance regression with new Linux 6.8 code that was causing his Linux kernel builds to be as twice as long as with previous kernels. An AMD Linux engineer was able to reproduce the regression and with upstream developers there is now a believed fix for this issue in the latest scheduler code...

All of the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) subsystem updates were sent out this week for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel...

Following the recent release of GRUB 2.12, another prominent open-source bootloader project is also out with a new release: Limine 7.0...