Phoronix

Valve has just published Proton 7.0-6 as the newest version of this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. Proton 7.0-6 had been available in testing and release candidate form since the end of last year while now has been promoted to stable...

Intel engineers this week published new Linux open-source driver code for TPMI, the Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface. Intel TPMI for seemingly future processors will allow for more streamlined power management handling and other enhancements over the way the Intel power management drivers currently function...

As part of other ongoing performance tests of Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" testing, I was curious to see how the more well-tuned Linux distributions are performing with the flagship Xeon Platinum 8490H processors relative to the common Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are those benchmark numbers alongside AMD's flagship Genoa server platform with two EPYC 9654 processors.

A proposed Linux kernel patch would provide a new Kconfig build time option of "CONFIG_DEFAULT_CPU_MITIGATIONS_OFF" to build an insecure kernel if wanting to avoid the growing list of CPU security mitigations within the kernel and their associated performance overhead...

For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support...

The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release...

As mentioned a few weeks back, Red Hat has been working to arrange a developer "hackfest" to further work out plans and development around HDR display support on the Linux desktop. They are aiming to bring together graphics driver developers, desktop developers, and other Linux stakeholders -- including possibly the likes of Valve -- to work out planning of high dynamic range monitor support over the next year or two for the Linux desktop. That Red Hat HDR hackfest has now been organized to happen in late April...

A half-year has passed already since Dbus-Broker 32 was released for this drop-in replacement to the reference D-Bus implementation that is focused on providing better performance and reliability. Today that's been succeeded by Dbus-Broker 33 as a relatively minor update to this software from the BUS1 project...

Following the release of Wine 8.0 stable from a week and a half ago, Wine 8.1 is out today as the first bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. These Wine 8.x development snapshots will then culminate with the release of Wine 9.0 next year...

Originally posted two years ago were Linux kernel patches for bringing up of CPU cores in parallel to speed-up the Linux boot process. With the growing core counts of servers and even high-end desktops / HEDT platforms, this parallel bring-up can lead to significant time savings at boot. The work, unfortunately, stalled but has now been revised...

Following last month's release of systemd 253-rc1 with many new features and changes in tow, out today is a second release candidate and is piling yet more features into this Linux system and service manager...

While there is Rusticl as the first Rust language code within Mesa as a modern OpenCL implementation in Gallium3D, for possible future driver efforts there is some initial exploratory work being done around coming up with bindings to support writing of Vulkan drivers with Rust...

The GNU Debugger "GDB" has landed initial support for being able to debug AMDGPU/ROCm platform code with a preliminary focus on HIP programs...

The RPM package manager code has added support for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels that allow for newer baseline targets than conventional x86_64. This support in RPM allows for installing RPMs built for newer feature levels on capable hardware...

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress...

LibreOffice 7.5 released on-schedule this morning as the newest version of this cross-platform, free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office...

Microsoft on Wednesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230126-2.0 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of use-cases from within Azure infrastructure over to WSL purposes...

Arm ended out January by publishing an early request for comments (RFC) version of its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) support for the Linux kernel so there can be KVM virtualization integration around Arm CCA, a KVM user-space ABI for managing Realms, and Linux guest support for Arm Realms...

While the Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers were aiming for release this week, due to outstanding blocker bugs it has instead resulted in a fourth weekly release candidate...

Valve has just published their Steam Survey results for the month of January. Apple macOS has eaten a tiny bit of marketshare from Windows while on a percentage basis there is no change for Linux...