Phoronix

GIMP 2.99.12 is out as a weekend surprise as the newest development release towards the GIMP 3.0 image manipulation program's release...

Debian has begun a general resolution process to solicit a vote by its stakeholders what to do with non-free firmware...

Earlier this month AMD posted Linux kernel patches preparing LbrExtV2 as updated Last Branch Record functionality being introduced with upcoming AMD Zen 4 processors. That LbrExtV2 support for the Linux kernel's "perf" subsystem has now been queued up in its respective branch ahead of the Linux 6.1 feature merge window beginning in early October...

As part of a broader effort to reduce system memory use on Ubuntu Linux particularly for server and container/cloud use-cases, Ubuntu 22.10's OpenSSH server has switched to using socket-based activation...

One of the questions that has come up following my AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Linux testing has been how well air-cooling is working out for the 280 Watt workstation CPU. Water cooling is, of course, most ideal but there are air coolers that can work out sufficiently too. Here are some quick reference results...

With the OpenMP 5.0 parallel programming specification there is the reverse offload capability for going from the offloaded device back to the system host. The GCC 13 open-source compiler is seeing work recently around supporting this functionality...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out early with his usual weekly development summary that highlights all of this prominent open-source desktop environment. Notable this week is KDE integrating support for re-binding extra mouse buttons as well as a lot of continued work on Discover...

NetworkManager 1.40 has been released as this widely-used software for configuring wired and wireless network interfaces under Linux...

Canonical has released a new version of Mir, their display server that now focuses on making it easy adapting new environments to use Wayland by being an adaptable Wayland compositor...

While we are about three years out from seeing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, it was announced today that the GTK2 toolkit will not be supported in that next major RHEL version...

In the year since Intel announced 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors there have been a number of patches tuning the Linux kernel's scheduler and other code to better deal with the mix of the performance and efficient cores. While that looked to be all buttoned up for a number of months now with Alder Lake CPUs performing well on Linux, another patch series further adjusting the Linux sched/fair code was published to help with these Intel hybrid processor designs...

While Intel GPUs support VESA Adaptive-Sync, for Arc Graphics Intel announced Smooth Sync as what amounts to a dithering filter to make screen tearing less of an issue when not running with vsync enabled or lacking an Adaptive-Sync display...

Meta/Facebook engineers have announced their work on THP Shrinker as a way for Linux's Transparent Hugepages (THP) to be more efficient and avoiding memory waste by removing under-utilized transparent hugepages...

Thanks to the work of independent developer Luke Jones and as part of his Asusctl Linux project, ASUS laptops continue seeing better feature support on Linux and with the v6.1 cycle kicking off in October are more ASUS ROG laptop enhancements that have been readied...

While LibreOffice has supported some input gestures in the past like swiping and long presses with the GTK front-end as well as some Android and iOS specific additions, it looks like greater gesture support is on the way for this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Lutris as the open-source game manager that integrates with the likes of Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and other game collections and emulators is out with a new update...

Intel's GPUs from the consumer desktop Arc Graphics hardware to the Intel Data Center Flex GPU Series "Arctic Sound M" and forthcoming Xe HPC Ponte Vecchio are built around fully open-source drivers. A common misconception or confusion I've heard many times over the past number of months has been questioning whether Intel's discrete GPU driver support on Linux is open-source or is closed-source, etc. Well, it's fully open-source aside from the usual firmware caveat and running on Linux. Here is some initial commentary with running the Intel Arc Graphics A380 on Linux!

Brought up back in 2020 was the readfile system call for efficiently reading small files with the intention of it being simple for reading small files such as those via sysfs, procfs, and similar file-systems. The readfile patches were re-based yesterday against the current Linux 6.0 state, leaving hope that the new system call might finally be sent in for the next kernel cycle...

The FreeBSD release engineering team has published their initial release plans for FreeBSD 14.0 as well as follow-on FreeBSD 13.2 and 12.4 releases for the current stable series of this BSD operating system...

While mostly of benefit to server administrators with large fleets of hardware, Linux 6.1 aims to make it easier to help spot problematic CPUs/cores by reporting the likely socket and core when a segmentation fault occurs, which can help in spotting any trends if routinely finding the same CPU/core is causing problems...