Phoronix

Future Intel CPUs and some existing processors via a microcode update will support a new feature called the Asynchronous EXit (AEX) notification mechanism to help with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave security. Patches for the Linux kernel are pending for implementing this Intel AEX Notify support with capable processors...

Along with the likes of OBS Studio adding NVENC AV1 support for enjoying GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, the widely-used FFmpeg library has merged its support for NVIDIA NVENC AV1 video encoding...

Last month Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede warned that old and "weird" laptops could see broken backlight controls with the upcoming Linux 6.1 kernel. He issued a call for testing and as a result was provided valuable feedback that led to some new fixes now on the way. But there still is more work ahead and he's requested further testing by Linux laptop users to ensure the reworked backlight handling is in good shape...

Made public earlier this year was Spectre-BHB / BHI as a speculative execution vulnerability similar to Spectre V2 and affecting Intel and Arm CPUs. At the time Neoverse N2 / N1 / V1 and older cores like Cortex-A15 / A57 / A72 were known to be vulnerable and required software mitigations. The upcoming AmpereOne is also vulnerable to Spectre-BHB and has a patch now on its way to the Linux kernel for mitigating this Spectre class vulnerability...

"BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY" is on the way for the Linux 6.2 kernel for dealing with some issues that originally turned up within Facebook's data centers where they were seeing routine out-of-space transaction aborts. With BTRFS_RESERVE_FLUSH_EMERGENCY, Btrfs will try harder to avoid aborted transactions when running out of space...

As an enhancement to the out-of-the-box Linux kernel in its default x86_64 configuration, it was being eyed to enable Indirect Branch Tracking by default. That change to enable IBT by default has been picked up by TIP's x86/core branch, thus putting it on deck as material for submitting with next month's Linux 6.2 merge window...

LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit...

AMD on Friday submitted a new round of patches for AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates they have ready for the upcoming Linux 6.2 cycle...

This summer AMD began posting Linux kernel patches for Quality of Service "QoS" features with new AMD CPUs. Sent out on Friday were the newest iteration of these QoS extension patches around SMBA and BMEC with these features likely premiering on AMD EPYC "Genoa" processors...

It's Saturday morning and that means there is a new weekly blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham about the prominent desktop changes that occurred this week...

A Friday patch series reveals a new security feature with Zen 4 previously not documented: Automatic IBRS...

On the same day as new GCC compiler patches for next-generation processors coming out for those wares that are more than one year out, the GNU Compiler Collection dropped a remnant from Intel's past: the Many Integrated Core "MIC" architecture support with Xeon Phi for offloading...

A patch on its way to the mainline Linux kernel tunes Alder Lake N and Raptor Lake P mobile processors to have slightly lower power consumption out-of-the-box to help with battery life and thermal characteristics...

Stemming from the recent discussion of Intel's open-source Linux driver for Arc Graphics not yet running on POWER, another rather interesting support caveat was also raised. It turns out updating the GSC firmware for Arc Graphics hardware currently requires the Intel Management Engine (ME) functionality, which basically limits the graphics card firmware updating in turn to systems with Intel CPUs...

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" will finally see its formal launch in January as recently revealed by Intel, it will then be succeeded down the road by Emerald Rapids. Succeeding Emerald Rapids will then be Granite Rapids to which there is now an initial GCC compiler enablement patch posted. Granite Rapids won't be out until at least well into 2024 while fortunately they have already begun their compiler enablement work to ensure that new CPU instructions and other capabilities are in place well ahead of launch...

BOLT as the Facebook/Meta-developed tech for optimizing binaries in the name of greater performance by optimizing the code layout was merged to mainline LLVM at the start of the year. Now as we approach the end of the year BOLT is getting a bit of a promotion with being flipped on by default for Linux x86_64 and AArch64 test releases...

Microsoft has issued a big update to their in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, with a few new packages introduced as well as various updates to existing packages and other OS modifications...

As was expected, AMD's Lisa Su just announced the Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards. AMD continues to back their graphics processors by fully open-source Linux driver support and Linux benchmarks will come on Phoronix for launch. Here are the initial details on the announced Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

With CPU core counts continuing to rise, we've seen various optimization efforts in recent times to help with the boot speed of getting large servers online. One of the latest discoveries can trim down the boot speed by up to 30 seconds for some large servers and what appears to be a next-generation AMD EPYC "Genoa" platform...

Next week already marks ten years since Valve made public their Steam on Linux beta builds while today Google has advanced Steam on ChromeOS / Chromebooks to beta. Back in March Google formally announced Steam for Chrome OS and began with alpha support for select devices. Today that support has reached beta with new device support, new features, and other improvements...