Phoronix

LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit...

AMD on Friday submitted a new round of patches for AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates they have ready for the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

This summer AMD began posting Linux kernel patches for Quality of Service "QoS" features with new AMD CPUs. Sent out on Friday were the newest iteration of these QoS extension patches around SMBA and BMEC with these features likely premiering on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors...

It's Saturday morning and that means there is a new weekly blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham about the prominent desktop changes that occurred this week...

A Friday patch series reveals a new security feature with Zen 4 previously not documented: Automatic IBRS...

On the same day as new GCC compiler patches for next-generation processors coming out for those wares that are more than one year out, the GNU Compiler Collection dropped a remnant from Intel's past: the Many Integrated Core "MIC" architecture support with Xeon Phi for offloading...

A patch on its way to the mainline Linux kernel tunes Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake P mobile processors to have slightly lower power consumption out-of-the-box to help with battery life and thermal characteristics...

Stemming from the recent discussion of Intel's open-source Linux driver for Arc Graphics not yet running on POWER, another rather interesting support caveat was also raised. It turns out updating the GSC firmware for Arc Graphics hardware currently requires the Intel Management Engine (ME) functionality, which basically limits the graphics card firmware updating in turn to systems with Intel CPUs...

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" will finally see its formal launch in January as recently revealed by Intel, it will then be succeeded down the road by Emerald Rapids. Succeeding Emerald Rapids will then be Granite Rapids to which there is now an initial GCC compiler enablement patch posted. Granite Rapids won't be out until at least well into 2024 while fortunately they have already begun their compiler enablement work to ensure that new CPU instructions and other capabilities are in place well ahead of launch...

BOLT as the Facebook/Meta-developed tech for optimizing binaries in the name of greater performance by optimizing the code layout was merged to mainline LLVM at the start of the year. Now as we approach the end of the year BOLT is getting a bit of a promotion with being flipped on by default for Linux x86_64 and AArch64 test releases...

Microsoft has issued a big update to their in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, with a few new packages introduced as well as various updates to existing packages and other OS modifications...

As was expected, AMD's Lisa Su just announced the Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards. AMD continues to back their graphics processors by fully open-source Linux driver support and Linux benchmarks will come on Phoronix for launch. Here are the initial details on the announced Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

With CPU core counts continuing to rise, we've seen various optimization efforts in recent times to help with the boot speed of getting large servers online. One of the latest discoveries can trim down the boot speed by up to 30 seconds for some large servers and what appears to be a next-generation AMD EPYC "Genoa" platform...

Next week already marks ten years since Valve made public their Steam on Linux beta builds while today Google has advanced Steam on ChromeOS / Chromebooks to beta. Back in March Google formally announced Steam for Chrome OS and began with alpha support for select devices. Today that support has reached beta with new device support, new features, and other improvements...

A set of patches were posted on Wednesdasy for "blksnap", a proposed kernel driver to allow creating non-persistent snapshots of arbitrary kernel block devices. Among the possible uses with blksnap would be for creating backups at the block storage device level...

Vulkan 1.3.233 is out as the latest weekly spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.3.233 comes three new NVIDIA-developed vendor extensions...

Back in September was a proposal to promote Rust's UEFI firmware targets to tier-2. With the current tier-3 designation the Rust UEFI targets they currently lack continuous integration (CI) guarantees and official builds in the Rust release channels, which means users wanting to use Rust for targeting the UEFI binaries need to rely on nightly/unstable compiler builds...

Making good progress this year has been the open-source FEX-Emu emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit Arm (AArch64). This isn't only for running Linux x86_64 applications on Arm but with Steam and Steam Play (Proton) can mean running Windows games on Linux 64-bit Arm. With FEX 2211 out today more progress has been made on the Proton front for getting more modern games running...

Besides open-source drivers being loved by Linux enthusiasts for the greater technical clarity/insight, better security with the ability to verify the driver's behavior, and better durability of the driver over the longer-term, another common open-source driver benefit is being able to get the drivers working on other CPU architectures not otherwise a focus by the upstream hardware vendor. With Intel's open-source graphics driver stack for Arc Graphics and also in the data center with the Data Center GPU Flex Series and forthcoming Ponte Vecchio, it's drawn interest from ARM, RISC-V, and POWER folks. Unfortunately at least in the case of the POWER9 hardware, the current Intel Linux graphics driver isn't yet building properly there...

The latest patches from Microsoft for the Linux kernel are for extending the kernel's support to allow running on a nested Microsoft (MSHV) hypervisor...