Phoronix

You may recall the Phoronix news earlier this year around an AMD "Sabrina" SoC appearing in Coreboot for open-source system firmware support. Over the past few months we've cited a number of AMD Sabrina hits in open-source code but outside of that haven't heard much else about "Sabrina" or seen it on AMD's roadmaps...

The Linux CIFS/SMB3 client updates were merged on Sunday for the Linux 6.0 merge window. Notable with this round of updates is a performance improvement for the multi-channel mode...

SUSE had been one of the big supporters of ReiserFS two decades ago when it was using the ReiserFS file-system by default but that practice ended in 2006. While SUSE/openSUSE hasn't defaulted to ReiserFS for many years, it has remained an install-time option and retained support for mounting ReiserFS file-systems, but that practice is likely soon ending...

Along with his various other pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees, Greg Kroah-Hartman submitted the Linux 6.0 staging changes this week...

Being merged into Mesa 22.3 this morning for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" are rewritten acceleration structures for the ray-tracing support...

BUS1 started out as a Linux kernel IPC module following the failure of KDBUS and while there still are occasional commits to that out-of-tree BUS1 kernel module, the involved (Red Hat) developers have been primarily working on Dbus-Broker as the high performance, user-space D-Bus implementation that delivers greater speed and reliability over the reference D-Bus code. Now also popping up under the BUS1 umbrella is "r-linux" as a Rust-written, capability-based Linux runtime...

Each new kernel cycle there continues to be more maturity to the RISC-V processor architecture code. With Linux 6.0 there are a few new features wired up as well as bug fixes / clean-ups...

The ACPI and power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.0 landed this week with continued preparations for upcoming Intel and AMD hardware as well as improving existing hardware support...

Earlier this year a developer stepped up willing to maintain Linux's FBDEV subsystem for frame-buffer device drivers since it fell into an unmaintained state in 2016 but even prior to that had been on the decline in the era of more proper DRM/KMS drivers. Helge Deller continues that work overseeing the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem and this week sent in the new patches for Linux 6.0...

Takashi Iwai of SUSE as the Linux sound subsystem maintainer has submitted all the new hardware support and feature updates targeting the Linux 6.0 merge window. The Linux 6.0 sound driver changes are notable when it comes to new AMD and Intel hardware support among other changes...

NetBSD 9.3 has been released as the newest version of this open-source BSD operating system known for running on many diverse platforms thanks to its focus oncode portability...

For those with a newer ASUS gaming laptop boasting RGB lighting for the keyboard, that functionality could soon be working nicely thanks to work happening within the Linux kernel and the open-source Asusctl project...

Going back to late 2020 there has been bits of Intel Vulkan ray-tracing preparations landing within their Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver in anticipation of Xe HPG with hardware ray-tracing capabilities...

Support for old NEC VR4100 CPUs based on the MIPS R4000 core is being removed with the Linux 6.0 kernel leading to devices like the old IBM WorkPad Z50 no longer being supported...

KDE developers have started the month of August to a lot of fixes and polishing for the Plasma desktop...

OpenJ9 v0.33 was released on Friday as the newest version of this Eclipse Foundation Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that was formerly developed by IBM...

While OpenRISC has been around a decade longer than RISC-V and its original support in the Linux kernel dates back to the v3.1 days, on the hardware side OpenRISC hasn't enjoyed nearly as much success as RISC-V and its kernel support not advancing nearly as rapidly. Now with Linux 6.0, OpenRISC is finally exposing PCI bus support...

DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films...

Earlier this week saw the Rust for Linux v8 patches posted that introduced a number of new abstractions and expanding the Rust programming language integration to more areas of the kernel. Those patches amounted to 43.6k lines of new code while "Rust for Linux v9" was posted today and comes in at just 12.5k lines of new code...

As with many new Intel/AMD laptops these days, the recently launched Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" SoC boasts ACPI Platform Profile support that is exposed under Linux for switching between low-power, balanced (default), and performance modes. For those curious about this ACPI Platform Profile impact, here are some benchmarks from this 6850U laptop under Ubuntu Linux and its impact on power and thermal efficiency too.