Phoronix

Being worked on since 2020 has been Linux support for user-space peer-to-peer DMA between NVMe drives and yesterday marked the latest iteration of those patches...

FreeBSD a few days ago published its Q1'2022 status report highlighting all the advancements made by this open-source operating system project...

Released at the end of May was AlmaLinux 9.0 as the first "community" distribution out of the gates based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 that reached GA in mid-May. I've been running AlmaLinux 9.0 on a few Intel and AMD servers to great success. And, yes, as expected the performance matches that of upstream RHEL9.

The tenth alpha release of the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine is now available for testing with some interesting additions...

Akamai Security Research today is lifting the public embargo on "Panchan", a new peer-to-peer botnet they are warning customers about that has been breaching Linux servers since March...

Fwupd 1.7.8 was released this morning as the newest version of this open-source utility built around the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for easy and practical updating of system and component firmware under Linux...

Out today is the beta release of LibreOffice 7.4 as the newest feature release in development for this cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Canonical has officially released Ubuntu Core 22 as its fully containerized version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is optimized for IoT and edge computing use-cases...

With the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel there is compute engine support for DG2/Alchemist graphics now exposed to user-space. Besides the Intel OpenCL Runtime / oneAPI Level Zero preparing to make use of that compute engine support, patches merged today to Mesa 22.2 also allow enabling the DG2-class Arc Graphics compute support within the OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...

Merged earlier this year into Mesa was "Dozen" for Vulkan on Direct3D 12 for use with Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux or in Windows cases where there may be a D3D12 driver installed but no Vulkan support. This is akin to the layering work Microsoft already supports for leveraging Mesa to provide OpenCL and OpenGL atop Direct3D 12. That "Dozen" driver is now readying Vulkan 1.1 support...

Earlier this year Pensando engineers began posting Linux patches for enabling their Elba DPU SoC. This data processing unit is powered by 16 x Arm Cortex-A72 cores and designed for supporting up to dual 200GE networking with this SoC intended for high-end networking equipment. It didn't take long for the AMD integration less than one month after AMD completed its Pensando acquisition with the new Linux patches now reflected as the AMD Pensando Elba...

Overnight Intel announced that the Arc A380 desktop GPU has launched in China and will begin appearing in the Chinese market this month...

Earlier this year the folks at firmware consulting firm 3mdeb announced a open-source Coreboot port to a retail Intel Alder Lake motherboard. It's very exciting since outside of Chromebooks, IHV reference boards, and custom server platforms at hyperscalers, it's still rare to find Coreboot support on modern, retail boards. That "Dasharo" open-source firmware effort for the MSI Z690-A WiFi DDR4 has come together nicely over a matter of weeks and the developers are now celebrating their v1.0 release...

Valve today promoted Proton 7.0-3 to stable as the newest version of this software based on Wine and leveraging DXVK / VKD3D-Proton and other components for running Windows games with great success on Linux. Proton 7.0-3 is now available for Steam Play when firing up the Steam client while Valve also today issued a new Proton Experimental update...

We have been writing about GIMP 3.0 for nearly a decade and with that stable release still out of sight, GIMP 2.10.32 is out as a six-month update to the aging GIMP 2.10 stable series...

In addition to the Hertzbleed frequency scaling side-channel attack being made public today as part of "Patch Tuesday" and affecting both Intel and AMD CPUs, Intel is additionally disclosing a set of "MMIO Stale Data" vulnerabilities. The Linux kernel has already been patched for these new vulnerabilities affecting multiple generations of Intel CPUs from Rocket Lake back to Haswell X and Skylake...

Hertzbleed has been made public today as a new family of side-channel attacks making use of frequency side channels. Both Intel and AMD have issued security advisories as a result...

Last week with the release of Blender 3.2 bringing AMD HIP support for Linux to provide for Radeon GPU acceleration, I posted some initial benchmarks of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series with HIP against NVIDIA RTX with OptiX. There was interest by some Phoronix readers in also seeing NVIDIA CUDA results even though OptiX is in good shape with RTX GPUs, so with that here are results of NVIDIA CUDA vs. NVIDIA OptiX vs. AMD HIP with Blender 3.2 on Ubuntu Linux.

KDE Plasma 5.25 is now shipping as the latest half-year major update to the KDE desktop...

Earlier this year Wine began experimenting with GitLab to improve their development workflow for this open-source project that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux. It's now been decided that the GitLab workflow is useful and will now be their path forward...