Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just announced the availability of Linux 5.19-rc6 as the latest routine test release for the upcoming Linux 5.19...

A set of proposed patches promise to make the Linux kernel's memchr() implementation faster for locating a character within a block of memory. In tests carried out by the developer, the new implementation can be nearly four times faster on large searches...

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on their graphics hardware appears to be in roughly good shape now for DG2/Alchemist based on external/independent monitoring of the effort...

The Linux kernel has long honored the "nordrand" kernel parameter to disable kernel use of the Intel RDRAND and RDSEED instructions if not trusting them -- either out of security concerns that they could be compromised by the vendor or running into hardware/firmware issues around RdRand usage. But the Linux kernel is preparing to drop that kernel parameter with users encouraged to use the more generic "random.trust_cpu" parameter...

WayVNC 0.5 was released on Saturday as a feature update to this VNC server for Wayland compositors leveraging the WLROOTS library...

Leah Rowe has announced the release of Libreboot 20220710, the downstream of Coreboot that takes a firm approach to ensure boot firmware freedom with avoiding proprietary blobs even when it means reduced hardware coverage/support. As such with avoiding the likes of the Intel FSP, the supported list of motherboards is quite limited...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting KDE changes this week, which includes building up of more work targeting Plasma 5.26 this autumn as well as KDE application enhancements and more...

Debian 11.4 is out as the fourth stable release update to "Bullseye" of this popular community-based Linux distribution...

In addition to the OpenChrome DRM/KMS driver hoping to be finally mainlined in 2022 for supporting aging VIA graphics hardware from the long-ago days of their x86 chipsets, separately there is a DRM/KMS kernel driver in the works for something even older... A Linux DRM graphics driver for the Atari Falcon from the early 90's...

Intel this week submitted to DRM-Next what it anticipates to be the last batch of "drm-intel-next" feature changes for the upcoming Linux 5.20 merge window...

KDE developers are looking at possibly making use of C++20 language features within the Plasma 5.26 desktop and the newer C++ usage could work its way to other KDE components with time too...

Cloud Hypervisor as what started out as an Intel open-source project and now lives under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for use with Linux KVM and Windows MSHV is out with a new feature release...

Gentoo developer Andreas Hüttel "Dilfridge" is experimenting with binary Gentoo package hosting and finding out what improvements to Portage are needed for making it more of a reality at a larger scale...

Following last week's release of Vulkan 1.3.219 that introduced the VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier extension and Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) adding support for it earlier this week, Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" has landed support for this new extension to close out the week...

The past few months we have been closely covering the Coreboot port to an MSI retail motherboard for Intel Alder Lake. This port carried out by the 3mdeb consulting firm has been with their downstream "Dasharo" firmware based on Coreboot while as of yesterday the motherboard port has begun landing in upstream Coreboot...

Canonical engineers have been continuing their quest to improve the start-up time for the Snap version of Mozilla Firefox that is used by default on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. With the latest improvements now pushed to the Firefox Snap, they are seeing around a 50% reduction in start-time for the web browser...

Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel's hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now? Here are some new benchmarks.

With the upcoming feature-packed Linux 5.20 kernel adding to the growing list of features is Intel SGX2 support looking like it is set to land...

At least some of Lenovo's new AMD Rembrandt powered laptops with Microsoft Pluton security co-processor are set by default to only trust Microsoft's key and not the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA Key that Linux distributions and others use for UEFI Secure Boot support. Thus by default only Microsoft Windows will boot with the default firmware configuration on some new Lenovo laptops...

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols...