Phoronix

Falkon as the KDE/Qt-focused open-source web browser is out with Falkon 3.2 as its first major update in nearly three years...

AMD recently launched the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card for the $199 USD price point. While built on the current-generation RDNA2 architecture, this graphics card was widely panned for its price while only offering 4GB of video memory, limited to PCIe x4 bandwidth, and performance similar to the years-old Polaris GPUs. While all the major benchmarks online to this point have been under Windows, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is performing under Linux.

For years Intel has been working on Linux patches for supporting their Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) with Indirect Branch Tracking and Shadow Stack support. It's been in the works for years and through many revisions while now they are pursuing a new route and focusing just on the Shadow Stack user-space functionality...

You may recall the news from a few months ago about the work to improve Btrfs' on-disk format in addressing "painful parts" of its design. That "extrent-tree-v2" work has been progressing and recently was queued up into the Btrfs for-next code albeit hidden behind a debug flag...

Intel open-source engineer Marcel Holtmann is marking the end of January with new releases to their ConnMan Linux network connection manager software along with a new IWD as their iNet Wireless Daemon as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems...

While many Linux enthusiasts like to cite Linux's stellar support for older hardware platforms, in reality that isn't always the case. For instance with many old X.Org user-space mode-setting drivers for powering old graphics cards at least for display purposes, they can no longer even build with with modern toolchains / software components. Given the lack of bug reports around such issues, there are very likely few users trying some of these vintage hardware combinations...

While it shouldn't be too surprising given Intel's open-source track record, but with the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel are once again many prominent additions from new/future hardware support to enabling exciting features...

Linus Torvalds' schedule due to travels remains a bit off and as such Linux 5.17-rc2 is already available this morning...

AMD open-source engineers sent out a request for comments on a new kernel feature called "PAN", or Process Adaptive autoNUMA. Early numbers shown by AMD indicate that PAN can help with performance in some workloads on their latest server hardware by a measurable amount...

One of the promising new BSD projects started over the past year was helloSystem as "the macOS of BSDs" and built atop FreeBSD but with a macOS-inspired design. A Phoronix reader has pointed out another entrant in this field with airyxOS as a FreeBSD-based operating system designed to be similar to Apple's macOS experience...

The latest GNOME 42 feature work to mention is a ten month old merge request landing that cleans up and improves the XWayland termination for when there are no more X11 clients running within the GNOME Wayland session...

One of the additions with EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors introduced last year was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization found with EPYC processors. While they have maintained an out-of-tree Linux source repository with the SEV-SNP patches, the mainline kernel is still lacking support for these latest security features but the code continues to undergo revisions and review for its eventual upstreaming...

For those interested in using Distrobox to augment your operating system's package selection, not all containers are created equally. Distrobox developer Luca Di Maio recently did some tests for looking at the Linux container performance...

Developed during Google Summer of Code last year was an updated screenshot and screen recorder user interface. That improved screenshot/screencasting UI was merged this week for GNOME 42...

Along with the broader industry trend of transitioning security-sensitive code to memory-safe languages like Rust, there has been an effort to write a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils. For nearly a year that Rust Coreutils has been able to run a basic Debian system while more recently they have been increasing their level of GNU Coreutils compatibility and in some cases now even outperforming the upstream project...

Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn't use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers...

Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options...

Along with Wine 7.1 releasing on Friday, Wine-Staging 7.1 is also available as the more bleeding-edge version of Wine that carries more than five huundred extra patches atop the code-base...

KDE developers have been very busy this month working up to the Plasma 5.24 LTS release in February. Plus with the 15 minute bug initiative underway and working to address remaining issues with the Plasma Wayland session, it's been a busy start of 2022...

In addition to this week bringing Oracle's GraalVM 22.0 release, Eclipse has released OpenJ9 0.30 as the latest version of their open-source Java Virtual Machine (JVM)...