Phoronix

With Linux 5.18 expected to be released as stable tomorrow and that opening up the Linux 5.19 merge window, feature work aimed for this next kernel should be largely wrapped up. Within the RISC-V architecture's "for-next" branch is several interesting additions...

Systemd 251 is officially out this Saturday as the first feature update to this Linux init system for 2022...

An early change made this week to Ubuntu 22.10 in its early development state is replacing the PulseAudio sound server with PipeWire...

The folks from the Polish open-source firmware consulting firmware 3mdeb are hosting another "OSF vPub" where they discuss open-source firmware efforts over beers in this currently-virtual event...

HarfBuzz 4.3 was released on Friday as this open-source library that serves as a text shaping engine used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Flutter, Java, all major web browsers, and other software...

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.25 beta release, KDE developers turned their attention to bug fixing and they accomplished a lot...

Wine 7.9 was released on Friday as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

To date Pop!_OS has been System76's own Ubuntu derivative pre-loaded onto their various laptops and desktops. Rather interestingly, HP is preparing to launch a new laptop that will make use of Pop!_OS...

It's been a fairly smooth week and Linus Torvalds is expected this Sunday to formally release the Linux 5.18 stable kernel. Unless he has any last minute reservations and decides to stretch it out an extra week, Linux 5.18 will be out as stable and with it comes a great deal of new features -- especially for benefiting AMD and Intel products from CPUs to GPUs...

Last week the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed switched to the new GCC 12 as the default system compiler and rebuilt its package set under this annual feature upgrade to the GNU Compiler Collection. For those curious here are some benchmarks before and after that GCC 12 transition for openSUSE Tumbleweed.

While Mesa's RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues seeing a lot of activity on a near daily basis by developers from Valve, Red Hat, Google, and other independent contributors, AMD continues with AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their internal, closed-source Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux. Out today is AMDVLK 2022.Q2.2 as the latest open-source snapshot of this Vulkan driver...

Fedora will keep around its legacy BIOS support that was decided earlier this month after a proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support to focus resources on UEFI-only booting. However, Fedora will be relying more on the community to maintain that legacy boot support and as such the Fedora BIOS Boot SIG (Special Interest Group) is now established...

Since Ubuntu 20.10 there has been Active Directory integration in the Ubiquity installer while now it looks like the latest effort by Canonical on enhancing the Ubuntu desktop for the enterprise is around Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration...

While the kernel-side Intel AMX support landed in Linux 5.16 and KVM support for AMX in Linux 5.17, other Linux patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) remain floating around. One important patch-set was updated this week for ensuring proper power management on AMX-enabled processors, coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" this year...

Merged yesterday to the mainline X.Org Server for XWayland is the "-force-xrandr-emulation" option added for Valve's Gamescope / Steam Deck usage...

AMD has released a new version of AOMP, its LLVM/Clang compiler downstream where they stage their latest patches focused on OpenMP GPU offload support for their Radeon graphics cards / Instinct accelerators...

While the hostname on Linux systems is widely relied upon for different applications, setting the hostname is usually left up to user-space by the init system at boot. However, should any user-space processes try to read the system hostname prior to it being set, it could lead to unintended results. So now finally in 2022 there is a kernel parameter working its way upstream with "hostname=" should you want to ensure the hostname is set before user-space is started...

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release...

Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production...

The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available...