Phoronix

With the Linux 6.2 kernel Sony DualShock 4 controller support was added to the "hid-playstation" driver as the newer open-source driver maintained by Sony and started out originally in supporting the PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers. The DualShock 4 controller was long supported by the "hid-sony" driver while now in the Linux 6.3 kernel that support will be removed...

KDE developers have had a busy start to 2023 with preparing Plasma 5.27 for release as the final feature version in the Plasma 5 series. Work on Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 continues heating up...

While the much anticipated OpenZFS 3.0 hasn't yet materialized as it was originally hoped for in 2022, OpenZFS 2.x continues on maturing nicely with fixes and other updates to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on FreeBSD and Linux systems...

Work on Wine 8.0 is winding down and it looks like the stable release could be out next week or otherwise very soon...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for dynamic blend equations to help with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation and ideally lead to less stuttering...

Intel Sandy Bridge processors launched 12 years ago this month and if you still are relying on these 32nm CPUs, it's really time to consider an upgrade for not only the performance but also security and power efficiency reasons. But if you are content with still churning away on a Sandy Bridge desktop under Linux, picked up for upstream and marked for back-porting is another attempt at dealing with visual glitches and GPU hangs that have been affecting some users with the integrated graphics...

A patch worked on by an Intel engineer for batched TLB flushing for page migration with folios is showing some promising results and currently working its way to the mainline kernel...

Microsoft's Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa is a Vulkan implementation built atop Direct3D 12 for enjoying this modern industry-standard graphics/compute API atop Microsoft's D3D12 API, should the system lack an underlying native Vulkan driver or in cases like using Windows Subsystem for Linux. Dozen is now above 99% for its conformance pass rate for Vulkan 1.0 and more of Vulkan 1.1 is now being worked on by Microsoft's engineers that contribute the open-source code to Mesa...

Released on Thursday was the oneAPI Level Zero Loader v1.9.4 as the newest open-source software release from the company...

Mold 1.10 was released today by lead developer Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high speed linker that has been outperforming GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

The Ubuntu xx.04.2 LTS releases tend to be a bit more meaningful for long-term support users since it includes the back-ported hardware enablement "HWE" stack with updated Linux kernel from the newer non-LTS release. Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS had been due for release on 9 February with that updated stack but is now pushed back to the end of the month over technical issues...

While we await the next post-R525 driver series feature release, NVIDIA today issued their newest production driver update for this current stable series...

As I wrote about earlier this week, Linux 6.3 is positioned to support AMD Zen 4's Automatic IBRS feature. AMD's Linux enablement code around Automatic IBRS has been undergoing review the past few months and now via TIP's x96/cpu Git branch is to be sent in next month for the Linux 6.3 merge window. I've run some preliminary benchmarks of the Automatic IBRS support on Zen 4 and it's looking positive for further enhancing the performance of AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors.

The KDE Plasma 5.27 beta is available for testing today as the next big update to the KDE desktop due out as stable next month...

Today a new drm-misc-next pull request was submitted for DRM-Next of various Direct Rendering Manager changes queuing for Linux 6.3. Most significant with today's pull request is eliminating seven old DRM drivers that are for vintage hardware and these open-source drivers are no longer maintained...

While there tend to be new Vulkan API specification updates weekly or bi-weekly for most of the year, there was a one month hiatus due to Christmas and other end of year holidays with many of the corporate developers taking time off work. But that is now over and out today is Vulkan 1.3.239 as the first update in exactly one month...

Debian 12 (codenamed "Bookworm") is expected to be released later this year and as such the first of several code/package freezes has begun...

Linux game porter and developer Ethan Lee has added initial support to Mesa for Microsoft's Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK). In turn this early code can allow running the "GLon12" Mesa driver atop the Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S game consoles that can ease porting OpenGL games to the Xbox...

Intel yesterday submitted another batch of material from drm-intel-gt-next to DRM-Next as new feature code and fixes to queue ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window opening next month...

Squeezing into the current Linux 6.2 kernel cycle is support for the XP-PEN Deco 01 V2 drawing tablet...