Phoronix

In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler...

Introduced nearly two years ago with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for many innovative use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. With the Linux 6.2 kernel, SquashFS is the latest file-system adding support for IDMAPPED mounts...

Introduced at the start of the year was an experimental open-source project implementing the VA-API interface over NVIDIA's NVDEC video decoding API. In turn this VA-API support for running atop NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver allows for GPU video acceleration within Firefox and other software only targeting the Video Acceleration API. Now in closing out the year is a new NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver release...

Merged back in Linux 5.13 last year was Landlock for allowing unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock allows restricting ambient rights for a set of processes and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM) for establishing safe security sandboxes. With Linux 6.2 file truncation support is added for Landlock...

In addition to the HID driver updates for the Linux 6.2 kernel that were merged this week, the input subsystem updates also landed this week and were headlined by having several new touchscreen drivers...

The RISC-V processor architecture changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.2 cycle...

While Debian 12.0 "Bookworm" will hopefully be out around mid-2023, Debian 11.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to the current Debian 11 "Bullseye" stable series...

After years of work the Apache project SpamAssassin has released its much-improved SpamAssassin 4.0 open-source software...

As of today the LLVM Git compiler finally has initial support for AMD Zen 4 CPUs with the -march=znver4 option now wired up for Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors...

Linus Torvalds can be known for his hardware commentary at times like hoping AVX-512 "dies a painful death", Intel's "bad policies" around ECC memory, and giving NVIDIA the finger. The latest colorful commentary by the Linux creator is around Intel's new Linear Address Masking (LAM) feature that aimed to land in Linux 6.2 but is now delayed until the code can be reworked...

After recently getting H.264 and H.265 video decode working for the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver with the current Vulkan Video extensions, David Airlie of Red Hat resumed his prior work on enabling the Vulkan Video extensions for the open-source Intel "ANV" driver too...

As written about last month, Sony has been working on adding DualShock 4 controller support to their newer PlayStation HID driver in Linux. The DualShock 4 controller has long been supported under the older "hid-sony" driver but now with Linux 6.2 the support can also be found under "hid-playstation"...

As a wonderful Christmas gift to KDE Plasma users on Wayland, fractional scaling under Wayland has been successfully merged...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.2 merge window...

Introduced in early 2021 with now prior-generation AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to their Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology. While this year saw the initial SEV-SNP support was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel, the hypervisor portion remain outstanding and have taken a step back as the AMD engineers overhauled their implementation...

With the Linux 6.2 kernel the NFSD code is taking another step closer to removing the older NFSv2 support...

Ahead of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable, Xeon CPU Max, and Intel Data Center GPUs shipping, Intel today announced the oneAPI 2023 tools release...

The KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop, which is to be the last Plasma 5 feature release before Plasma 6.0, is poised to introduce revamped multi-monitor handling...

Last month when AMD launched the EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series they also published AOCC 4.0 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler derived from LLVM/Clang and tailored to their latest Zen microarchitecture. At the time I ran some AOCC 4.0 benchmarks on the Ryzen 7000 series and compared it to GCC and Clang. Since then I've had the time on my Genoa test rig to look at how well AOCC 4.0 is performing and in this article are some benchmarks with the EPYC 9374F processors between GCC and AOCC 4.0.

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests...