Phoronix

As a nice Christmas present, code merged today to the Linux 6.2 kernel speeds up a core kernel function by a factor of 715x...

The Linux 6.2 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) open-source kernel graphics/display driver changes have been merged with a few notable feature additions for users this cycle...

The x86 memory management updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window have been submitted with two primary additions: addressing another "tasty target for attackers" and separately is also landing of Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality...

Released on Sunday was Linux 6.1 and in addition to having many new features making it all the more exciting is that it's expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel release. As such it will see widespread adoption particularly among servers and much interest from the hyperscalers. For those weighing an upgrade from last year's Linux 5.15 LTS kernel, Linux 6.1 with initial testing on an AMD EPYC Milan-X 2P server has shown a nice speed bump is possible across a wide-range of workloads.

As outlined yesterday the Radeon RX 7900 series can work on the upstream, open-source Linux driver stack if using Linux 6.0+ and Mesa 22.2 (but ideally 22.3+). But if you aren't wanting to jump to a newer kernel version and are running one of the supported enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD released their Radeon Software for Linux 22.40 driver package with Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA3" series support...

Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13...

Back in 2020 the Linux kernel added a split-lock detector since when they occur an atomic instruction spanning multiple cache lines and requiring a global bus lock is needed. This has an unfortunate heavy impact on the system and thus the detector was added to report it to the kernel log when a split-lock occurs. But earlier this year starting with Linux 5.19, kernel developers decided to "make life miserable" and intentionally slow down bad behaving apps that abuse split-locks. That in turn has caused problems for some games -- so far select Windows games running under Steam Play -- and thus a new kernel knob is being added to more easily adjust the behavior...

All of the Arm SoC support additions and DeviceTree updates have been merged for the Linux 6.2 merge window. There is support for a number of additional Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in the kernel as well as having the initial mainline bits for the Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max SoC variants...

Budgie desktop lead developer (and former Solus Linux developer) Joshua Strobl has proposed a Fedora Budgie desktop spin for Fedora 38...

What first entered the kernel as the "Software Defined Silicon" and now set to be marketed as Intel On Demand is ready to go with Linux 6.2 for this CPU license activation model appearing with upcoming Intel Xeon server processors...

The Intel TDX guest support has been merged into the in-development Linux 6.2 kernel...

The Btrfs and EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window have been submitted. The Btrfs changes are rather notable with continued performance enhancements as well as making some reliability improvements to its native RAID5/RAID6 modes...

After being in various forms of discussion since 2017, IOMMUFD has been submitted for the Linux 6.2 kernel as it lays the groundwork for aiming to overhaul IOMMU handling by QEMU and virtual machines on Linux...

While now in the code freeze for Wine 8.0 as the next annual stable release of Wine for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, one of the features that didn't make it is the long in-development Wayland driver. Thankfully though the Wayland driver continues to mature and it looks like early next year following Wine 8.0 it might finally be upstreamed...

Firefox 108 is now available for download as the last major Firefox web browser release of 2022...

Today's the day that the embargo expires on being able to provide reviews on the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards... After testing both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards the past two weeks, today I have the initial performance numbers to share on these graphics cards and the current state of the open-source Linux graphics driver for these first RDNA3 graphics cards. Here is the first look at AMD's new flagship desktop Radeon graphics cards running under Linux with fully upstream and open-source graphics drivers.

For those that were holding out hope that the AMD P-State Linux driver's EPP functionality for more power/performance control under Linux would be ready for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window, it's been rejected for the cycle and will be held off until at least the Linux 6.3 cycle begins in February...

The Raspberry Pi team has a positive supply chain update with some good news ahead of Christmas and when they expect to reach pre-pandemic supply chain levels...

As part of the many pull requests being sent in early for the Linux 6.2 merge window to avoid crunch time around the holidays is the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework updates...

The OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew that traces its roots back to the days of Mandrake Linux is out with a "platinum" release candidate of their upcoming OpenMandriva ROME 22.12 release, which is their rolling release flavor...