Phoronix

After being in development for several months, Asahi Lina with the Asahi Linux project has posted the initial Rust Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem abstractions for review as well as a preview of the experimental state of the AGX DRM driver providing the open-source kernel graphics driver support for Apple M1/M2 hardware...

In addition to Intel's Linux patches in recent days working on broad performance optimizations that can benefit all hardware there has also been some Intel-specific kernel improvements being worked on like the Sapphire Rapids C0.2 idle state support that was published for review on Monday. Also coming out from the covers on Monday was a new patch series for the "iaa_crypto" driver to improve the Linux support for Intel's In-Memory..

The GNOME Shell and Mutter release candidates ahead of this month's GNOME 44 desktop update are now available for testing...

With the Linux 6.3-rc1 kernel now out and that closing the Linux 6.3 merge window, the open-source Linux graphics driver developers are turning their attention to feature work they want to accomplish for Linux 6.4 this summer. Already the first drm-misc-next pull request has been submitted to DRM-Next with some of those early changes that will target the v6.4 kernel...

For those that happen to have an ASRock B75M-ITX in their collection or have just been looking for an old Intel Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge era system that can run the open-source Coreboot firmware, this mini-ITX desktop motherboard can run upstream Coreboot with the latest changes made this week...

Posted today were a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling Sapphire Rapids C0.x idle states support, which can provide a nice bump to the energy efficiency of the latest-generation Xeon Scalable servers while also helping out with possible turbo boost benefits for the busy CPU cores to enhance overall system performance...

FEX-Emu 2303 was published today as the newest version of this open-source software for enjoying x86 64-bit Linux software to run gracefully on 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) including the likes of Linux games and Valve's Steam client with Steam Play (Proton)...

Now that the Linux 6.3 merge window is over with Linux 6.3-rc1 having been released last night, here is a look at all of the interesting changes, new features, and hardware support coming with this next major kernel version.

Debian developers today released APT 2.6 as the newest version of this package manager that will ship as part of the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release...

The rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed recently began rolling out optional x86-64-v3 optimized packages for those on roughly Intel Haswell or newer systems and wanting to squeeze out maximum performance from their hardware. The selection of x86-64-v3 packages built by openSUSE Tumbleweed is currently rather limited, but hopefully this major Linux distribution joining the HWCAPS party will lead other Linux distributions to follow suit...

I love Linux kernel patches that mention "massively", use exclamation points when talking about performance, and/or simply mention big speed-ups. Quite often such patches come out of Intel and last week they sent out another great performance optimization patch series to improve additional low-level bits of the kernel...

The Asahi "AGX" Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 graphics hardware has seen preliminary work merged into Mesa 23.1 for supporting compute shaders/kernels...

Last year AMD acquired Pensando in part for adding DPUs to their portfolio from this young company that only exited its stealth mode in 2019. While sadly it's missed out on the Linux 6.3 cycle, AMD-Pensando engineers continue work on upstreaming support for their "Elba" SoC into the mainline Linux kernel...

LibreELEC 11 is out today as the newest version of this Linux distribution that is purpose-built for an HTPC-oriented experience powered by the recent Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software...

The merge window for Linux 6.3 is now over and Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc1...

On this last day of the Linux 6.3 kernel merge window, Linus Torvalds merged the patch dropping support for Intel (ICC) compiler support. Specifically this is Intel's long-standing ICC compiler now known as the "Intel C++ Compiler Classic" prior to its transition to being LLVM/Clang-based with the modern Intel DPC++ compiler...

This past week saw the first two consumer PCIe 5.0 NVMe solid-state drives released to retail: the Gigabyte AORUS Gen5 10000 and the Inland TD510. I've been testing the Inland TD510 2TB Gen 5 NVMe SSD the past few days. While in simple I/O testing it can hit speeds almost up to 10,000 MB/s reads and writes, for more complex workloads it quickly dropped against popular PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD options. In my testing thus far of this first consumer Gen5 NVMe SSD it's left me far from impressed.

Merged on Saturday to upstream Coreboot was support for some of the latest Intel Alderlake (and signs of Raptor Lake) powered laptops from Linux vendor System76...

Ahead of the Linux 6.3-rc1 release later today, a set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out Sunday morning that include the change to allow Single Threaded Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) to be used in the presence of legacy Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) for security reasons...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.3 is a new release of Wine-Staging, the experimental/testing blend of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux. Wine-Staging 8.3 carries more than 500 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...