Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.0 in time for some US Labor Day holiday weekend testing...

A change queued up as part of the "x86/mm" TIP changes expected to land for Linux 6.1 will now have the default kernel configuration warn at kernel boot time around any W+X mappings that pose a security risk...

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter updates ahead of this month's GNOME 43 desktop debut...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for compatibility with GPUOpen's Radeon Raytracing Analyzer...

KDE's Kaidan app has been in development for a number of years now as a Jabber/XMPP chat client built around Kirigami and Qt Quick. Kaidan has been under active development and formally became a KDE project in 2019. It's newest ambition is now working out encrypted audio and video calls...

GravityMark 1.70 has been released as the multi-API graphics benchmark developed by Tellusim Technologies that was started by one of the former Unigine engine developers...

GNU Grep 3.8 was released today for this commonly-used command-line utility for search plain text data. With the GNU Grep 3.8 it's now made more clear that if you are still relying on the egrep and fgrep commands, it's past due for switching to just grep with the appropriate command-line arguments...

Currently when it comes to shipping new/updated device support for firmware updating under Linux with FWUPD/LVFS, it requires making/adjusting a Fwupd plug-in for carrying out the actual firmware copying/updating of the device and then adding in the device VID/PID to a quirks table so Fwupd knows about what to match a given device to for the firmware plug-in to use. Even in new devices where no plug-in changes are required, new device entries are still needed in the quirks table and it makes it challenging when Linux distributions don't quickly move to new FWUPD releases. Moving forward a better solution is being explored...

There is a lot of last minute feature work and improvements heading into Plasma 5.26 ahead of its upcoming beta and feature freeze...

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin...

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel...

PipeWire 0.3.57 was released on Friday as the newest update to this Linux audio/video streams management solution that aims to fill the functionality currently provided by the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

The sdl12-compat is a SDL 1.2 compatibility layer implementation atop SDL 2.0. This sdl12-compat project allows for old, out-of-date games and other applications relying on the old SDL 1.2 interface to in turn run via the modern SDL2 library for better compatibility with input devices, Wayland support (assuming no direct X11 hard dependencies), support for PipeWire audio, improved input controls, and various other enhancements only found in SDL 2.0 and not the unmaintained SDL 1.2...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension...

Back in July Intel's Peter Zijlstra proposed "Call Depth Tracking" as a mitigation approach for handling Retbleed and avoiding the "performance horror show" of Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) usage. Out today is the newest version of the Call Depth Tracking code and the performance benchmark results are looking very promising for lessening the pain of the Retbleed CPU mitigation performance impact...

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus...

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel...

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days...

Stemming from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS activating systemd's out-of-memory daemon (systemd-oomd) and users finding their web browser being killed when facing memory or swap pressure, a change has been upstreamed in systemd to help alleviate this situation...

An independent contributor to the open-source Mesa 3D graphics project has begun eyeing AVX-512 support by the LLVMpipe software rasterizer due to AVX-512 being present with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors...