Phoronix

During the course of February on Phoronix were 236 original news articles covering the state of open-source affairs and Linux performance. While the pandemic seems to be lightening up, sadly the ad industry is still in a downward state, but in any event here is a look at the most popular Phoronix content for the past month...

Smartmontools 7.3 was released as the first update to this open-source package in more than one year for providing a utility (smartctl) and daemon (smartd) for monitoring the SMART capabilities built into modern (S)ATA / NVMe / SCSI / SAS disk drives...

Wasmer 2.2 was released on Monday for this WebAssembly (WASM) run-time that aims to "run any code on any client" with this open-source stack working across operating systems / platforms and supporting a variety of programming languages...

Dav1d as the leading CPU-based, open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN project is nearing its v1.0 release...

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree were updated AMD firmware images for Picasso, Raven, and Raven2 hardware with a rather important fix...

Vodafone in collaboration with Canonical is showing a prototype "Cloud Smartphone" as Mobile World Congress happening this week in Barcelona...

It's been four years since the release of Dbus 1.12 (and even 20 months since the last point release [v1.12.20] up until this week when v1.12.22 was tagged) while today Dbus 1.14.0 is being introduced for this user-space IPC solution for Linux systems...

Earlier this month I noted a Linux scheduler change queued into sched/core ahead of the Linux 5.18 cycle that is expected to help AMD EPYC processors and other select Zen processors in various workloads. The change has been in the works for several months and is about adjusting the allowed NUMA imbalance when spanning multiple LLCs. I've now carried out some of my own benchmarks on EPYC hardware and indeed is further ratcheting up the Linux kernel performance.

Linux Mint Debian Edition "LMDE" continues to be developed in the event that Linux Mint itself which is based on Ubuntu would have to shift its base over to upstream Debian. Out today is LMDE 5 Beta...

It looks like for the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle coming up it could begin allowing modern C11 code to be accepted rather than the current Linux kernel codebase being limited to the C89 standard...

Last week a new version of Intel's IWD open-source wireless daemon was published with a few improvements and new features for this increasingly used alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems...

Intel's Linux enablement work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) continues for better securing virtual machines on future Intel hardware platforms...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc6 to cap off the week that he describes as "nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombieapocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much."..

As noted last week there were Linux developers discussing the idea of removing the ReiserFS file-system given that it hasn't been really relevant in more than a decade and is very unlikely to be used still in production use-cases with modern kernels. It looks like the deprecation will move forward but the actual removal from the mainline kernel won't happen until 2025...

While free software developer Con Kolivas is known for his work on the Linux kernel to improve desktop responsiveness and efforts like BFS and MuQSS, there is also user-space software he has developed. One of those user-space programs under is belt is LRZIP, the Long Range ZIP format, that is focused on providing speedy compression of large files and to do so with lower amounts of memory...

Coreboot 4.16 is out this weekend as the newest quarterly release for this project striving for open-source system firmware / BIOS replacements...

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends...

According to the Coreboot camp, future Intel systems with FSP 3.0 and Universal Scalable Firmware (USF) will be even less friendly for open-source system firmware...

Already for the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle on the AMDGPU driver side has been preparations for new hardware blocks presumably coming with RDNA3 GPUs, FreeSync Video Mode by default, and other changes. As likely the last "feature" pull of AMDGPU material for Linux 5.18, another pull request to DRM-Next was submitted on Friday...

NVIDIA's Orin SoC with twelve Cortex-A78AE CPU cores and Ampere graphics should be quite a strong offering when it's more broadly available later this year. This "Tegra234" SoC has been seeing work on enabling it with the mainline Linux kernel and the latest fruit of that work is a new HDA audio driver set for introduction with Linux 5.18...