Phoronix

While the Ubuntu desktop has been using the GNOME Wayland session by default, Ubuntu's default Firefox browser build within its Snap confinements has continued relying upon XWayland. But the Firefox Snap beginning with Ubuntu 23.10 is now enabling the native Wayland support by default...

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS...

Wine 8.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries...

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine...

It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven't been following Ubuntu's own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file...

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, "intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half" Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the "Xe2" graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors...

AMD on Thursday released ZenDNN 4.1 as the newest release of their Zen Deep Neural Network Library for accelerating inference workloads on AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. The ZenDNN library remains API compatible with Intel's oneDNN library and helps for building out optimized AI workloads for use on AMD Zen processors...

A Red Hat engineer has published patches to optionally allow delayed module signature verification in an effort to have a secure Linux system but to allow for faster boot times...

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server...

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library...

From my early testing thus far of the Linux 6.6 kernel in its very early state, some of the most impressive gains are happening on AMD's high core count server processors, the EPYC 9754 "Bergamo" in particular is enjoying some stellar improvements for various server workloads on this forthcoming kernel.

The Linux kernel currently allows disabling support for 32-bit programs and 32-bit system calls at compile-time, but a new option expected to be introduced with Linux 6.7 this winter will provide a new "ia32_emulation" boot time option to allow unconditionally disabling support for 32-bit programs and system calls...

Back in July Intel announced AVX10 as the future of AVX-512 and how they ultimately plan to support more Advanced Vector Extensions capabilities on both future P and E cores. Since then they've begun making preparations to the open-source compiler toolchains around enabling AVX10...

The past two years AMD's AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve's Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware...

One of the nifty new features with Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors not talked about much is the In-Field Scan (IFS) functionality for allowing various tests to be carried out prior to deploy the new processors or over time in the data center for trying to spot any silicon-level issues. IFS aims to uncover any processor issues not caught by ECC, parity checks, RAS, or other safeguards when new CPUs reach the data center or as they age over time...

Red Hat multimedia expert Wim Taymans has released PipeWire 0.3.80 as the newest version of this open-source solution for efficiently handling video and audio streams on the Linux desktop...

As part of the effort for enabling UEFI support with ReactOS, an open-source operating system re-implementing binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows, a development build of ReactOS is up and running on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console...

While catching up on my Linux kernel benchmarking across different systems the Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" desktop performance has been particularly volatile. Linux 6.5 is running slower for the Core i9 13900K compared to Linux 6.4 for a number of different workloads. Buckle up for a wild ride but the good news is a stable fix is forthcoming.

When Canonical rolled out their new Flutter-based Ubuntu Linux desktop installer it lacked support for ZFS root file-system installations. Canonical has been quiet about their (Open)ZFS intentions after years of offering it as an Ubuntu install option with their prior installer, but for Ubuntu 23.10 this support is being restored...