Phoronix

With Linux 6.4-rc1 released, here is my original overview of all the interesting changes coming for the Linux 6.4 kernel that will be released as stable at the end of June or in early July.

While GCC 13.1 recently released as the first major stable release of the GCC 13 series, for those continuing to depend upon last year's GCC 12 stable series there is a new point release available today...

Development of the NVK open-source NVIDIA Mesa Vulkan driver is being done in part on a nearly decade old GeForce GTX 980M mobile graphics processor since at the moment it's one of the more recent NVIDIA GPUs that can be re-clocked using the existing Nouveau kernel driver code...

One of the recent change proposals for the in-development Fedora 39 is to ship systemd's mkosi-initrd as a modern and superior alternative to Dracut for constructing initrds...

In development for several years now has been TrenchBoot as a framework for creating security engines to perform system launch integrity actions. This boot-time integrity framework continues advancing and this past week Oracle engineers posted their latest patches for the Linux kernel in providing dynamic launch support...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc1 that also marks the end of the merge window for the exciting Linux 6.4 cycle...

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used, open-source bootable RAM testing software. In February marked memtest86+ 6.10 with UEFI Secure Boot signing and other new features. Out today is now memtest86+ 6.20 where a driving focus for this release is on improving support for older hardware...

FEX-Emu 2305 has been released, the open-source project continuing to work on x86_64 atop 64-bit ARM (AArch64) emulation support for being able to enjoy more games on ARM Linux and other software not otherwise natively available...

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors...

Going back years there has been patches for allowing the Linux x86_64 kernel to build as Position Independent Executable (PIE) code to further enhance the system security. Antgroup engineers most recently have been tackling the Linux x86_64 PIE support and last week sent out a new patch series...

Intel Shaodw Stack support was submitted for Linux 6.4 at the start of the merge window but now with this two-week merge window drawing to a close, it hasn't been pulled yet and Linus Torvalds raised technical issues with the proposed patches that now jeopardize its arrival this cycle...

While the Linux 6.4 merge window is closing this weekend, today on the last full day of the period is Jens Axboe submitting pipe FMODE_NOWAIT support as what he's described as a big performance and efficiency improvement...

One of the missing RISC-V features now in place for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel is system hibernation / suspend-to-disk support...

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs...

While these days Linus Torvalds is mostly dealing with herding new code into the Linux kernel and being a gate keeper rather than actively developing new kernel code himself, for the in-development Linux 6.4 he's found himself doing a bit of coding...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham shared that key KDE developers are currently in Germany for an in-person Plasma 6.0 development sprint...

Today's Steam client beta will be a delight for some Linux gamers with the Steam client finally recognizing the GNOME and KDE desktop global scaling factor for text sizing...

For those that haven't yet watched the AMD openSIL presentation from the OCP Regional Summit in Prague from April, the most interesting takeaway was deserving of its own article... AMD openSIL is planned to eventually replace the well known AGESA and that it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack -- just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned but will support all AMD processors...

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward...

Going back to mid-2022 AMD engineers have been working on Virtual NMI support with SVM for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an efficiency optimization. With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel the AMD VNMI support has been merged...