Phoronix

Red Hat has been among the key Linux stakeholders working for years toward the ultimate goal of ensuring the Linux desktop will have suitable High Dynamic Range (HDR) support in place. They are working to organize a hackfest this year to further the progress being made on HDR application support on the GNOME desktop as well as associated open-source graphics driver infrastructure...

Lighttpd 1.4.68 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this lightweight, high performance open-source web server...

In addition to Fedora 38 now allowing "no-omit-frame-pointer" to enhance profiling/debugging with possible performance costs, this next Fedora Linux release is also planning to use "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3" compiler defenses to further bolster security...

Over the holidays some fun benchmarking was to be had with the dual AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" processors providing a combined 192 cores / 384 threads and seeing how various modern Linux distributions were competing for this flagship 4th Gen EPYC server configuration. Up on the testing block was AlmaLinux 9.1, CentOS Stream 9, Clear Linux 37930, Debian 12 Testing, Fedora Server 37, Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Ubuntu 23.04 daily.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has landed a few patches into Mesa 23.0 for further reducing the CPU overhead of the Vulkan driver's draw path...

Since GCC 11 there has been support for AMX and the upcoming Sapphire Rapids CPU features, which has been further improved in the open-source compiler over the past two years. GCC 13 meanwhile as the next GNU Compiler Collection release is bringing Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest, Grand Ridge, and Granite Rapids. Basic enablement of Intel's Emerald Rapids meanwhile was merged yesterday for GCC 13 too...

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221222 on Tuesday as their first update of 2023 for their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes within the company from Azure to other behind-the-scenes Linux OS use...

GNOME's Mutter now allows disabling XWayland support at build-time if so desired. This is part of the broader GNOME effort for making X11 support optional and ultimately allowing for a modern Wayland-only environment if so desired and without carrying legacy X11 cruft...

While back in 2018 when the C-SKY architecture was merged to the Linux kernel it was talked about possibly being the last new CPU arch/port to be mainlined given the growing success of RISC-V even back then, it looks like that upstream kernel developer belief might not hold true. France-based Kalray that focuses on high-performance, data-centric computing from cloud to edge posted their initial Linux kernel patches today for their "KVX" kernel port to get the kernel running on their MPPA3-80 "Coolidge" DPU SoC with the KV3-1 CPU architecture...

The past several months saw much discussion over a proposal to add "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" as a default compiler flag to Fedora Linux that would improve profiling/debugging but with possible performance implications that can vary based on the application/workload. While just over one month ago FESCo rejected that change, they re-voted today and decided after all to allow this change to happen but to ensure that packages can easily opt-out if they find performance regressions. By Fedora 40 they will also re-visit the matter to determine if the benefits and performance costs are justified...

DragonFlyBSD 6.4 is now available as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system forked long ago from FreeBSD...

It's been one year and a few days since BusyBox 1.35 was released while today it's been succeeded by BusyBox 1.36 for this software package that is common to embedded Linux environments with the lone executable providing a plethora of commands and functionality...

GIGABYTE announced this morning they have spun off their server business unit and formed Giga Computing for their enterprise products moving forward...

Intel is using the CES 2023 to announce their 13th Gen Intel Core mobile H/P/U-series processors, additional 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" desktop CPUs for the 35 and 65 Watt tiers, and new Intel Processor (formerly Celeron) and Core i3 N-series processors.

Fwupd 1.8.9 was just released as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems...

The Tellusim Engine that is focused on professional simulations, visualizations, urban planning, VR/AR, and other 3D tasks has added a comprehensive set of Rust programming language bindings...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of several more changes / new features planned for Fedora 38...

With the Linux 6.2 merge window behind us, feature work for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes targeting now the Linux 6.3 kernel have begun queuing with DRM-Next...

The newest CPU back-end added to the LLVM compiler stack is for Xtensa processor cores...

Thanks to Valve's incredible work on Steam Play and investing in low-level Linux graphics stack improvements, the latest milestone being achieved is HDR (High Dynamic Range) support beginning to work...