Phoronix

While Linus Torvalds isn't much of a fan of FUSE / user-space file-systems, the FUSE code within the kernel does continue making improvements...

Vulkan 1.2.191 is out this morning as the latest update to this graphics/compute API. As usual is a variety of bug fixes / clarifications to the specification while this time around is also one new extension...

For more than a year there has been work on FGKASLR for finer grained kernel address space layout randomization. While KASLR is widely-used these days, with enough guessing or unintentional kernel leakage, the base address of the kernel can be figured out. Finer grained KASLR allows for randomization at the per-functional level to dramatically boost defenses. The latest take on FG-KASLR has now been published...

To help out memory pressure / out-of-memory killing solutions like systemd-oomd or Android's LMKD, Linux 5.15 is introducing the "process_mrelease" system call to more quickly free the memory of dying processes...

The RISC-V architecture updates have landed in the Linux 5.15 kernel with more software features now being supported...

Notcurses as an open-source library designed for complex and "blingful" text user interfaces and character graphics, now works not only on Linux but also Windows and macOS. Notcurses makes it easy for CLI-based programs to support a wide range of colors, multimedia, Unicode, and other features not normally associated with command-line applications...

Intel Compute Runtime 21.35.20826 is available today with initial support for oneAPI Level Zero v1.2...

While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support...

The platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel continues to be quite active with particularly offering better support for modern Intel/AMD laptops. With Linux 5.15 there is another big batch of improvements that landed at the end of last week...

A change made by Linus Torvalds and merged today for Linux 5.15 is enabling the "-Weror" compiler flag by default for all kernel builds...

Being worked on for several years now on the Linux desktop has been high resolution scrolling including work for it around X Input, the libinput library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems, and the kernel driver side for the HID/input devices to support it. The latest user-space work is high resolution scroll wheel support within the next libinput release. Separately, with Linux 5.15 is now additionally support for high resolution scrolling with the Apple Magic Mouse...

One of the kernel patch series that has seen ongoing work for more than one year now is around introducing the FUTEX2 system call to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' NT kernel in order to allow for more efficient Proton/Wine usage that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

With Linux 5.15 there are optimizations for EXT4, big improvements for XFS, and significant work on Btrfs too. Rounding out the notable file-system work on Linux 5.15, the F2FS updates were submitted and subsequently landed for this next kernel version...

Released at the start of August was dav1d 0.9.1 for this high performance CPU-based AV1 open-source video decoder while now another point release is available with yet more optimizations...

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code...

Stemming from an ongoing Mesa GBM discussion over introducing new gbm_bo_create_with_modifiers2 / gbm_surface_create_with_modifiers2 functions since the original "gbm_*_create_with_modifiers" functions lack support for passing usage flags, NVIDIA confirmed that the Sway Wayland compositor is working fine with their forthcoming driver supporting GBM...

While Samsung has explicitly stated before that queued TRIM works for Samsung 860 SSDs on Linux and thus leading to only older Samsung 840/850 drives being blocked from queued TRIM usage, that turns out to be inaccurate and now more quirks are added for the Samsung 860 and 870 series SSDs on Linux...

While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged...

KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session...

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...