Phoronix

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle the RISC-V CPU architecture's default kernel configuration "defconfig" is being tweaked so it's capable of running Docker out-of-the-box...

As was expected given all the recent kernel activity, Linux 5.19-rc8 was released today rather than going straight to the Linux 5.19 stable release, which has been diverted now to next Sunday. Linux 5.19-rc8 ships with many last minute fixes for this summer 2022 kernel update...

Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks...

While normally big CPU security mitigation work done behind closed-doors is in good shape for the vulnerability embargo date, Retbleed has been an exception. Nearly two weeks since Retbleed was made public, the Linux kernel patches around it continue with more now sent in today ahead of Linux 5.19-rc8 to address fallout from the mitigation handling...

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations...

While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality...

While relevant Intel and AMD processors have been mitigated for the recent Retbleed security vulnerability affecting older generations of processors, those mitigations currently just work for x86_64 kernels and will not work if running an x86 (32-bit) kernel on affected hardware. But it's unlikely to get fixed unless some passionate individual steps up as the upstream developers and vendors have long since moved on to just caring about x86_64...

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...

Linux 5.20 is adding Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to the MSM DRM/KMS driver and now the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is also enabling that A619 GPU support which in turn enables open-source OpenGL acceleration on devices like the Fairphone 4...

The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release...

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Yesterday I delivered my initial arsenal of AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Linux benchmarks against various other AMD Ryzen and Intel Core notebooks. That ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U is happening from a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 AMD notebook and this new "Rembrandt" device continues looking good under Linux. But prior to installing Linux, I did run some benchmarks of Lenovo's Windows 11 Pro on there for seeing how the Linux vs. Windows performance is looking for this Zen 3+ SoC.

Just shy of two weeks since fwupd 1.8.2 was released with supporting more hardware for system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux, Fwupd 1.8.3 has now arrived as the newest version...