Phoronix

Back in 2019 IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat while today is a "quasi-acquisition" of sorts being announced with Red Hat's Storage team being transferred to the IBM Storage team...

I always love pull requests that start off with "there's a bunch of performance improvements..." as is the case with the new Btrfs feature pull for Linux 6.1...

Last week I shared some initial numbers how surprisingly when disabling Zen 4 CPU security mitigations can actually *hurt* the Ryzen 7000 series CPU performance. While conventional wisdom and with past Intel/AMD processors yield better performance when disabling the CPU security mitigations, with the Ryzen 9 7950X it was found to be basically the opposite. I have since conducted more tests and using an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X to confirm the earlier results and dig deeper into the data.

OpenZFS 2.1.6 was released on Monday as the newest stable update of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and BSD platforms...

Researchers out of Boston University have been working on "Unikernel Linux" to explore application-specific optimizations to the Linux kernel...

NVIDIA has released CUDA 11.8 that enables support for their latest Hopper and Ada Lovelace families of GPUs...

The random number generator "RNG" and crypto subsystem pull requests have already been submitted for the Linux 6.1 merge window...

As a follow-up to the Rust infrastructure pull request for Linux 6.1, Linus Torvalds pulled the initial Rust code into the mainline Linux kernel this evening...

The ACPI, power management, and thermal subsystem pull requests have been sent in for the in-development Linux 6.1 kernel...

Git 2.38 was released on Sunday and most notable with this feature release is the inclusion of scalar as a Microsoft-developed repository management tool to make it easier dealing with very large Git reposotories...

A kernel hardening security improvement on the way for Linux 6.1 is the ability to provide warning of possible memcpy() based overflows. Right now this is only a warning but it's work towards being able to address "trivially detectable" buffer overflow conditions within the kernel and in the future may be able to block such overflows from happening...

Before getting busy with the AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" desktop testing, I recently wrapped up some benchmarks looking at the ACPI CPUFreq vs. AMD P-State frequency scaling drivers and various governor options for the AMD Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile SoCs. If you are curious about the impact of CPUFreq/P-State and the various governors for the latest AMD laptops running Linux, this round of testing is for you.

IceWM 3.0 was released today as the latest major update to this X11 window manager that has been development since the late 90's with a particular focus on simplicity and speed...

OpenMandriva ROME is a rolling-release version of this Linux distribution whose roots trace back to the days of Mandriva and before that Mandrake Linux. This rolling release flavor of OpenMandriva is now up to a "gold" candidate status...

There's been a lot happening in Debian recently from improving their handling of non-free firmware to switching to PipeWire and WirePlumber with Debian 12. Another change on the way is picking up Ubuntu's work on dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME desktop...

Among the early pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 6.1 merge window was the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates...

Mainlined back in 2017 was the statx() call for reporting enhanced file information and stats like finally reporting a file's creation time, data version numbers, and other attributes. Statx has continued evolving since its introduction in Linux 4.11 and now for Linux 6.1 is being expected to support reporting direct I/O alignment information...

Following yesterday's release of the upstream Linux 6.0 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-libre 6.0 as their downstream that removes driver support for loading binary firmware/microcode and the ability to load non-free-software kernel modules...

Linus Torvalds just promoted Linux 6.0 to stable on-schedule and thereby now ushering in the Linux 6.1 merge window to officially get underway tomorrow...

Linux 6.0 is bringing many great features but looking ahead for Linux 6.1 there are even more changes to get excited about for that kernel which will release as stable around the end of 2022...