Phoronix

AMD on Friday upstreamed new Family 19h CPU microcode to linux-firmware.git...

While the Steam on Linux marketshare has been consistently increasing this year since the launch of the Arch Linux powered Steam Deck, the September 2022 numbers are in and surprisingly there is a slight pull-back in Linux use...

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit...

It's happening, folks! Linus Torvalds already indicated recently he intends to pull the initial Rust programming language support into the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle and today that pull request was submitted to him. Linux 6.0 isn't out yet but should be on Sunday unless any last minute problems, which in turn will mark the start of the two week v6.1 merge window...

In addition to Ubuntu 22.10 switching to PipeWire as the default audio server replacement to PulseAudio, upstream Debian has done the same ahead of their Debian GNU/Linux 12 release next year...

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers this week sent out their latest patch series working on workload hints that are used for dynamically tuning the power profile of AMD GPU SoCs based upon the specified workload indicator...

For those with an AMD APU system like the Steam Deck and using the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" and wanting to enjoy the popular game Red Dead Redemption 2, an important fix has been merged for Mesa 22.3...

Well known Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz, working for Valve on improving Mesa's OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver, has kicked off October by removing a lot of old Mesa code...

It was a very exciting September with the launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors, Intel revealing a lot more about Arc Graphics, Linux 6.0 getting buttoned up while feature work toward Linux 6.1 accelerated, ongoing exciting kernel work around MGLRU / IO_uring / RT / etc, and other software releases like GNOME 43 and LLVM 15 all made for an eventful month...

Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2...

While some Linux enthusiasts eagerly recommend users boot their systems with the "mitigations=off" kernel parameter for run-time disabling of various relevant CPU security mitigations for Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, TAA, Retbleed, and friends, with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" processors while still needing some software mitigations, it's surprisingly faster for the most part leaving the relevant mitigations enabled...

Currently Linux's Logitech HID++ driver "hid-logitech-hidpp" relies on a static list of device quirks for indicating which Logitech mice support high resolution scrolling. With the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel, the plan is to change that list of devices/quirks and to automatically determine if a device supports high resolution scrolling...

Linux 6.0 should be released as stable on Sunday unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. AMD has sent in a last minute set of patches for their AMDGPU kernel driver with Linux 6.0 for dealing with what appear to be the upcoming RDNA3 graphics cards...

This week was word of the Intel Arc Graphics A770 launching for $329+ on 12 October, yesterday was the embargo lift on the Arc Graphics A750 also shipping on 12 Ocrober for $289+, and now today is another embargo lift concerning Intel Arc Graphics.....

The Ubuntu-based Linux Mint operating system has been working to enhance its Driver Manager utility for dealing with proprietary and other out-of-tree kernel hardware drivers...

Recently the open-source AMD OpenGL driver "RadeonSI" enabled OpenGL threading by default for the "glthread" option that has long been opt-in on a per-game/app basis. Along with that has been a number of glthread-related improvements to this code that punts executing OpenGL calls to a separate CPU thread. The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has now unconditionally enabled OpenGL threading too...

Microsoft engineers continue working on improving their Direct3D 12 driver within Mesa for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) usage and similar...

On Thursday night Canonical released the beta of next month's Ubuntu 22.10 "Kinetic Kudu" Linux distribution update...

Cloud-Hypervisor as what started as an open-source project by Intel and now run under the Linux Foundation umbrella as a Rust-based, modern-focused hypervisor for cloud workloads keeps on advancing. In addition to Intel, Microsoft and Arm continue investing significant resources into Cloud-Hypervisor for this security-focused VMM for running Windows and Linux guests...

Prior to ending out the third quarter, AMD's graphics driver team has released AMDVLK 2022.Q3.5 as their newest open-source Vulkan Linux driver update...