Phoronix

For the past several years Latte Dock has been a popular macOS-like "dock" for the KDE Plasma desktop but development has now ceased...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as an interactive, ray-traced visualizer that was added to their oneAPI software suite and powered by their OSPRay engine. Released on Monday was the latest update to this open-source program...

Earlier this year I wrote about the Intel Idle driver support being prepared for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs but a limitation with these forthcoming Xeon Scalable processors was that C1 and C1E c-states handling are now mutually exclusive. Unlike earlier Xeon processors, C1 and C1E states couldn't be enabled at the same time. Fortunately, via new Intel firmware they have managed to overcome this limitation...

After years in the works, the "PREEMPT_RT" support for building a real-time Linux kernel might finally be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle if the last few remaining bits are reviewed/signed-off on in time for next week's merge window...

NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations...

Last week when posting my initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U performance (and also looking at the AMD Rembrandt Windows vs. Linux speed), there were two main areas to get excited about with these AMD Zen 3+ SoCs: nice power efficiency improvements across many real-world workloads and the graphics upgrade with the integrated Radeon 680M. In this article are more tests of the Radoen 680M graphics looking at the integrated graphics speed-up with RDNA2 finally replacing Vega as a big upgrade and also how this compares to the Intel Alder Lake P Xe Graphics performance for Linux laptops.

ByteDance as the Chinese company behind TikTok has been working on a number of Linux kernel optimizations the past few years and their most recent work is for faster Kexec rebooting of the kernel. With their massive fleet of servers powering TikTok and other apps, they will do whatever they can to shave milliseconds off the boot/reboot time of their servers and that is what most of their Linux optimizations have been about -- including this newest patch series for faster Kexec reboots...

Samsung has posted a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling their Trinity neural processing unit (NPU) hardware as accelerators found within some of their embedded systems. Samsung Trinity NPUs have been in use since 2018 and their newer Trinity "TRIV2" accelerator is found within the latest Samsung TVs for AI purposes. Samsung hopes to upstream this new Linux driver simply named "trinity" into the mainline kernel...

Intel and MediaTek have just announced a strategic partnership where some future chips for MediaTek will be manufactured by Intel Foundry Services (IFS)...

The VKMS driver within the Linux kernel allows for virtual kernel mode-setting as a software-only KMS/DRM driver that can be used for virtual testing purposes and other uses around headless systems. New patches out of Google are working on ConfigFS support for this virtual display driver and from there making it easy to build out your own virtual graphics device configuration with VKMS...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle the RISC-V CPU architecture's default kernel configuration "defconfig" is being tweaked so it's capable of running Docker out-of-the-box...

As was expected given all the recent kernel activity, Linux 5.19-rc8 was released today rather than going straight to the Linux 5.19 stable release, which has been diverted now to next Sunday. Linux 5.19-rc8 ships with many last minute fixes for this summer 2022 kernel update...

Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks...

While normally big CPU security mitigation work done behind closed-doors is in good shape for the vulnerability embargo date, Retbleed has been an exception. Nearly two weeks since Retbleed was made public, the Linux kernel patches around it continue with more now sent in today ahead of Linux 5.19-rc8 to address fallout from the mitigation handling...

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations...

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality...

While relevant Intel and AMD processors have been mitigated for the recent Retbleed security vulnerability affecting older generations of processors, those mitigations currently just work for x86_64 kernels and will not work if running an x86 (32-bit) kernel on affected hardware. But it's unlikely to get fixed unless some passionate individual steps up as the upstream developers and vendors have long since moved on to just caring about x86_64...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...