Phoronix

Following the RHEL 9.0 Beta from last November and CentOS Stream 9 for the bleeding-edge RHEL9, the AlmaLinux crew today announced their 9.0 beta milestone. AlmaLinux over the past year has proven itself capable as a popular, community-based RHEL alternative that started after Red Hat announced it would discontinue the no-cost CentOS Linux downstream...

WebAssembly as the W3C standard for a portable binary-code format for executable programs on the web and elsewhere continues seeing exciting new use-cases for speedy web applications and even desktop purposes. This open standard continues advancing though and the first public working drafts of WebAssembly 2.0 were published today...

NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is set to be officially released this Thursday while available today are the hopefully-final release candidate images...

With the Arch Linux based Asahi Linux running well on the Apple M1 (aside from accelerated graphics and various other features not implemented yet), one of the areas I was curious about was how well LLVM Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers compete when running on the Apple M1 with Linux. In this article are some quick benchmarks looking at how the stock compilers on Asahi currently compare for Apple's Arm-based SoC.

Being worked on for a while has been a more powerful Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtualization target. It looks like that new virtual machine target will come with Linux 5.19 for allowing m68k guests with up to 3.2GB of RAM and up to 128 VirtIO devices...

Last weekend saw the release of Box86 0.2.6 and Box64 0.1.8 for enjoying x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit Arm and other CPU architectures. Out today meanwhile is the release of FEX-Emu 2204 as another open-source project making it easy to run x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64...

While most Linux distributions will include linux-firmware.git firmware files as the collection of firmware/microcode binaries needed by various mainline Linux kernel drivers, Debian does not. While the kernel drivers are open-source, the firmware files tend to be binary-only/closed-source, but these days are increasingly necessary for any level of functional support. Thus Debian is left in the awkward position of either providing poor hardware support and users left wondering what's going on or to make some improvements to better deal with today's world of firmware necessities...

There are many networking changes already building up in "net-next" ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle kicking off this summer. Merged yesterday is support within the Mellanox Ethernet "mlxsw" kernel driver for supporting the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch...

This year AMD engineers working on hardware enablement for Linux have been busy with EDAC driver improvements like RDDR5 and LRDDR5 handling, AMD Scalable Machine Check Architecture (SMCA) additions for "future" CPUs, and the various other areas outside of the error detection and correction field. Today though is a new patch series back in that hardware error handling space with new SMCA code...

Similar to Sony contributing PlayStation 4 compiler support in LLVM with Clang being their preferred code compiler, Sony has now begun upstreaming PlayStation 5 (PS5) support in the open-source LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

Git 2.36 is out as the newest feature release to this widely-used, open-source distributed revision control system...

Back in January was the change pushed into SDL2 Git where the library prefers Wayland by default where available rather than defaulting to using X11 support. However, pushed today into SDL2 is a revert on that earlier change due to Wayland issues that the developers are more comfortable sticking to X11/XWayland by default until various Wayland problems are addressed...

A Canonical kernel engineer is now proposing an Intel P-State performance fix for latest-generation Intel Alder Lake processors be back-ported to the Linux 5.15 LTS series. In turn this should then be picked up by Ubuntu 22.04's kernel build moving forward and others on this latest long-term support series for Linux...

Back in 2019 Western Digital announced their work on ZoneFS as a new Linux file-system just designed for specialty use-cases and running on zoned block devices. There hasn't been much code churn around ZoneFS in a number of kernel releases since it was merged back in 2020 while for Linux 5.19 this summer a number of fixes/improvements have been queuing up...

Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support...

In matching behavior already provided by the GCC compiler, LLVM/Clang has landed "RandStruct" functionality to allow optionally randomizing the structure layout for C code...

The "virtio-crypto" kernel driver for supporting the VirtIO-spec'ed virtual crypto hardware accelerator for virtual machines is about to offer significantly better performance...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May...

There have been bug reports recently for those using GNOME Shell 42 whether it be the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora (Silverblue) 36 Beta over crashes or blank screens appearing when making use of the Radeon DRM/KMS kernel driver. That older Radeon DRM driver is for pre-GCN 1.2 graphics processors (aside from those on GCN 1.0/1.1 that switch to using the AMDGPU kernel driver with optional module parameters) while now Mutter has landed a fix for this issue...