Phoronix

A set of "x86/urgent" patches were sent out this morning for pulling into the Linux kernel ahead of today's 6.1-rc2 release...

There has long been a debate over an "accelerator" subsystem for the Linux kernel given the increasing number of AI/accelerator devices coming to market. Currently there are accelerator drivers living within the catch-all "char/misc" area of the kernel while some driver efforts have been focused on Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem integration given the commonality with GPUs and some of the core infrastructure and APIs being relevant for both GPUs and these dedicated accelerator ASICs. There finally seems to be some agreement over the future of the accelerator subsystem and some initial patches were mailed out this weekend...

A new Linux driver introduced by Intel earlier this year was the In-Field Scan for making use of new silicon failure testing functionality with upcoming Intel server CPUs. The IFS driver and associated hardware capability is for detecting potential problems not caught by parity or ECC checks on systems in production. In-Field Scan was merged in Linux 5.19 but then shortly thereafter the driver was marked "broken" due to some driver design issues coming to light. New patches for IFS have been posted to improve the driver's design and remove that "broken" tag...

Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel...

After being worked on the past year, Mesa 22.3 has landed support for Wayland's DMA-BUF Feedback extension for use by the Mesa Vulkan drivers with the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code...

In addition to GCC landing patches this week in preparing for Grand Ridge and Sierra Forest, the LLVM/Clang open-source compiler stack has also been seeing patches to prepare for future Intel server processors...

Intel earlier this year more formally announced DAOS as its distributed parallel file-system designed for NVMe storage and aims to be more efficient than other parallel file-systems. Yesterday marked the release of DAOS 2.2 as the newest step forward for Distributed Application Object Storage...

FreeBSD had a busy Friday with releasing their first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 12.4 as well as publishing their third quarter development summary...

Last week saw the release of Plasma 5.26 while this week KDE developers moved on to more feature work for Plasma 5.27 while also addressing some fall-out and fixes for Plasma 5.26...

While Intel with the rest of the tech industry continue investing immense resources in areas around AI and talking it up, one of the efforts that has been slow to materialize on the Linux side has been for enabling their Gaussian and Neural Accelerator (GNA) with the mainline Linux kernel. This week the latest Intel GNA driver patches were posted for this neural co-processor...

The very promising Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL implementation within Mesa has landed a set of patches today that make it easier to enable the OpenCL compute device support with the various Gallium3D drivers...

Linux's universal TUN driver that provides packet reception and transmission for user-space programs may soon see a 1000x speed-up with a proposed patch sent out today for this network driver...

AMD today published their latest open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1, as their first source update in three weeks...

Last Thursday AMD finally sent out the basic enablement patch for AMD Zen 4 "znver4" with the GCC compiler. Once again it was tardy with Ryzen 7000 series processors already shipping and sadly the cost tables (tuning) is still catering to Zen 3 rather than updated for Zen 4. While as of today this -march=znver4 support has been merged into GCC 13...

Red Hat's storage team responsible for the Stratis solution has released a new feature update...

Windows users are increasingly making use of Mesa with Microsoft investing in supporting a number of different open, industry standard APIs and then layering them atop the underlying Direct3D 12 driver for the likes of WSL2 usage. OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VA-API video acceleration have been the primary targets for Microsoft engineers working on Mesa with the Windows Subsystem for Linux in mind while also posing other possible use-cases where the host may lack native drivers for those APIs. For bettering Mesa on Windows, Microsoft has now added support for compiling against the DirectX 12 Agility SDK...

As part of Intel's work starting to enable the compiler support for their Sierra Forest CPUs, AVX-VNNI-INT8 and AVX-IFMA support has been merged into the GCC 13 compiler for supporting these instructions being first introduced with Intel's Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge...

Thanks to a Google engineer in communication with Microsoft engineers, the "hid-microsoft" upstream Linux driver is seeing work to support the rumble mode on newer Xbox controllers...

If as an Ubuntu Linux user you have been held off on purchasing one of the new Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards due to the prospects of having to upgrade your own kernel, Mesa, and linux-firmware packages, Intel has a solution for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS users in the form of a packaged driver...

Earlier this year Coreboot and the Dasharo downstream were ported to the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 motherboard. This was very exciting in that a current-generation Intel desktop motherboard could run Coreboot and readily available through various Internet retailers. But many inquired about whether the MSI PRO Z690-A DDR5 variant would see similar support and now that too is being worked on...