Phoronix

Taking place yesterday and today in San Francisco has been the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. Talks this year ranged from how Amazon AWS is making use of OpenZFS to a number of optimizations and improvements currently being tackled by open-source developers...

After the idea has been discussed for about a year, Mesa 22.3 has landed a new performance option called "block_on_depleted_buffers" to wait on buffers at the end of a swap to reduce latency -- a possible one frame advantage...

While various Linux kernel components are increasingly making use of the Zstandard compression algorithm, the Zstd code in the kernel has tended to trail behind upstream. Fortunately, a push is underway to get Zstd 1.5.2 in the Linux 6.2 kernel cycle that kicks off at year's end...

Memtest86+ v6.0 has been released for this open-source system memory (RAM) testing utility. Memtest86+ v6.0 is the first major release of this program in nearly a decade and comes as a complete rewrite to better deal with modern hardware...

sdl12-compat is the library implementation allowing old SDL 1.2 games/software to work atop SDL2. This sdl12-compat can allow for Wayland support if there is no other direct X11 usage by the software itself, native support for PipeWire, improved input controls, and the many other enhancements enjoyed with the much more modern SDL2 library. Released yesterday was sdl12-compat 1.2.60 as the newest stable release for this conversion/support library for vintage software...

Flatpak 1.15 was released on Monday as the newest test release for this increasingly used open-source sandboxing and app distribution tech...

In addition to supporting the SiFive HiFive Unmatched, Allwinner D1 Nezha, and VisionFive RISC-V board support, Canonical has formally announced Ubuntu 22.10 for the LicheeRV as a $16~19+ RISC-V board...

Python 3.11 stable is out today as a rather big update for this popular scripting language...

AMD today published AOMP 16.0-1 as their newest LLVM/Clang downstream focused on providing the latest Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading support. Notable with this AOMP build is providing initial support for GFX1100 - GFX1103 GPUs. The GFX11 IP block is coming with the soon-to-launch RDNA3 graphics cards and with this AOMP support gives us hope AMD will be providing punctual ROCm support for these next-generation graphics cards...

Last week AMD reaffirmed their 3 November announcement for RDNA3 graphics while today the company announced that one week later on 10 November they will be unveiling their next-gen server processors...

Sony recently announced the DualSense Edge wireless controller for the PlayStation 5 as an "ultra-customizable controller". This $199 USD controller isn't even available for sale until the end of January while already Sony has contributed initial support to their "hid-playstation" open-source Linux kernel driver for supporting the DualSense Edge...

In addition to Alyssa Rosenzweig leading the work on bringing up OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 SoCs with the Mesa "AGX" Gallium3D driver, developer Ella Stanforth has been working on "AGXV" as a Vulkan driver implementation for the Apple Silicon hardware on Linux. As of yesterday, she hit the milestone of being able to run the VKCube demo...

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent out the third revision to the Apple SoC CPU frequency scaling "CPUFreq" driver that is working its way toward the mainline Linux kernel...

Earlier this month marked the release of IceWM 3.0 as this X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's. IceWM 3.1 is now available with various fixes and minor additions -- including refinements to the tabbed windows support introduced in IceWM 3.0...

Queued up in FUSE's "for-next" kernel branch is a patch worked on in recent months for allowing non-extending parallel direct writes to the same file...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.1-rc2 kernel, which he characterized as "unusually large" in what started off as a quiet week...

A set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out this morning for pulling into the Linux kernel ahead of today's 6.1-rc2 release...

There has long been a debate over an "accelerator" subsystem for the Linux kernel given the increasing number of AI/accelerator devices coming to market. Currently there are accelerator drivers living within the catch-all "char/misc" area of the kernel while some driver efforts have been focused on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem integration given the commonality with GPUs and some of the core infrastructure and APIs being relevant for both GPUs and these dedicated accelerator ASICs. There finally seems to be some agreement over the future of the accelerator subsystem and some initial patches were mailed out this weekend...

A new Linux driver introduced by Intel earlier this year was the In-Field Scan for making use of new silicon failure testing functionality with upcoming Intel server CPUs. The IFS driver and associated hardware capability is for detecting potential problems not caught by parity or ECC checks on systems in production. In-Field Scan was merged in Linux 5.19 but then shortly thereafter the driver was marked "broken" due to some driver design issues coming to light. New patches for IFS have been posted to improve the driver's design and remove that "broken" tag...

Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel...