Phoronix

Back in August 2021 saw initial patches by Intel for "FineIBT" for the Linux kernel as aiming to combine the best of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity for upping the kernel security protections in an efficient manner...

A first batch of "drm-misc-next" patches have been sent in for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.2 merge window comes about in December. With this initial batch of new material for v6.2 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver: OFDRM...

The open-source SVT-AV1 encoder for AV1 content that is primarily developed by Intel software engineers continues getting faster and finding new ways to provide better tuned presets and yield better performance for AV1 encoding on CPUs...

Corsair this summer launched the HX1500i power supply as the latest in their HX series. The Corsair HX1500i provides three EPS12V connectors, a fully modular design, and as implied by the model is sized for providing 1500 Watts. This $399 USD power supply can now also interface with the Linux kernel for monitoring support...

While the Linux 6.1 merge window just passed and the "Call Depth Tracking" patches have been in development the past few months, it looks like that for the Linux 6.2 kernel is where that alternative mitigation technique will be introduced for helping offset some of the significant performance regressions incurred for Intel Skylake era processors as a result of recent CPU security vulnerability mitigations...

Two weeks ago was the release of systemd 252-rc1 with introducing the new systemd-measure command, a "support-ended" taint flag for OS images detected past their end-of-support date, and a wide variety of other changes and feature additions. Systemd 252-rc2 is now available for additional testing with various fixes plus a few more additions...

If you habitually ride Mesa Git for the latest and greatest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver code and use the KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland, you may have noticed a glitchy cursor recently. Fortunately, that's now fixed up with today's Mesa Git code and ended up stemming from the recent global enabling of Mesa OpenGL threading...

Last week saw Intel sending out new GCC compiler patches for adding the "Sierra Forest" CPU target and the number of new x86_64 instructions it's adding. Those GCC patches follow Intel publishing an updated programming reference manual where they detailed these new instructions coming for Sierra Forest Xeon CPUs as well as Grand Ridge. Now on the LLVM compiler side, they too have begun landing new patches for these new Intel instructions...

Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 work on Linux if you are running the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa. The gaming experience is decent aside from occasional driver issues. One of the games that has been pesky with the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver has been the HITMAN 3 title running under Steam Play but with the newest Mesa 22.3 code should now be fixed up...

Mold as the open-source high performance linker continues its ascent in working to prove itself as a viable alternative to LLVM's LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.6 is out today with the latest fixes and features...

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a modern Rust-based OpenCL implementation for open-source Gallium3D drivers has shown it's capable of outperforming AMD's open-source ROCm compute stack for at least some GPUs and workloads...

The USB Implementers Forum on Tuesday announced the USB4 v2.0 specification that allows USB transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps over USB Type-C connections...

AMD under their GPUOpen umbrella has published a paper on their new technology dubbed "GI-1.0" that is a fast, scalable two-level radiance caching scheme for real-time global illumination. This means of real-time global illumination says it can deliver comparable quality to other GI implementations while said to be much faster. GI-1.0 will be open-source, AMD says, but the code isn't yet published...

As some interesting open-source news out of Microsoft today, their open-source Windows Termina that has been in development the past few years and providing many modern features is now the default beginning with Windows 11 22H2...

MoltenVK as the portability layer for Vulkan that exposes this industry standard graphics API on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS platforms is now able to expose Vulkan 1.2 compatibility...

Git 2.38.1 was just released along with updates to older versions, including the new point releases of v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, and v2.37.4. The big set of Git updates today is due to two more security issues coming to light...

AMD, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have used this week's OCP Global Summit to announce Caliptra as their open specification for a silicon Root-of-Trust (ROT) to be found with future CPUs / SoCs, GPUs, NICs, SSDs, and other hardware components.

Last year the OpenPOWER Foundation announced LibreBMC as a POWER-based open-source BMC and now they have progressed to the point of actually demoing this BMC backed by a fully open-source software stack...

Coreboot 4.18 had been planned for release in August but after that slipped, this newest Coreboot feature release is now shipping and comes with many hardware support improvements and other changes for this open-source system firmware implementation...

Back in August I wrote about a patch to change AMD's CPU microcode loading on Linux to now patch every logical CPU thread rather than just per physical core. It turned out that at least some CPU microcode updates do make per-thread modifications while the Linux kernel microcode handling for AMD was just applying microcode updates at run-time on a per-core basis. That patch was seemingly forgotten about but has now been queued up as part of x86 "urgent" changes for the mainline kernel...