Phoronix

Released last month was Cemu 2.0 as open-source software and with Linux support for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that for years has been in development but up to that point closed-source and Windows-only. Cemu 2.0 continues advancing with another bug-fixing update out today...

Endeavour OS 22.9 "Artemis Nova" is out today as the newest version of this enthusiast-oriented Linux distribution built around Arch Linux...

Ahead of Intel Raptor Lake and AMD Zen 4, it's a lot of fresh CPU re-testing at Phoronix under Linux with the bleeding-edge software stack of the latest Linux kernel as well as many new/updated benchmarks, the latest motherboard BIOSes, and more. As over the past year there has been a lot of work by Intel open-source engineers around better tuning the Linux kernel for their hybrid architecture, here are some fresh side-by-side benchmarks of the Intel Core i9 12900K against the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

Mike Blumenkrantz has been working under contract for Valve on the open-source Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Mesa but that work has carried over into the Mesa Vulkan drivers too where there is common overlap. His recent work has been focused on lowering the CPU overhead of some operations with the RADV Vulkan driver...

Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project...

Meta/Facebook has turned to kernel live-patching (KLP) with Red Hat's Kpatch the the Linux kernel livepatch infrastructure to handle live updates to "several million servers". Meta engineers shared during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference around the successes they've had with it as well as troubles encountered along the way...

As a follow-up to the recent article about Mesa preparing a software fallback for S3TC, that code was merged for next quarter's Mesa 22.3...

A change queued in HID-next ahead of the Linux 6.1 cycle aims to enable HID++ protocol usage for all Logitech Bluetooth devices...

Hopefully being mainlined next cycle with Linux 6.1 is the Multi-Gen LRU, or better known as MGLRU, as a superior alternative to the kernel's existing page reclamation code. Assuming it lands for Linux 6.1 as the last complete kernel cycle of 2022, this would make it one of the most exciting innovations to make it into the kernel this year...

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive...

Longtime open-source Linux graphics driver developer and DRM subsystem maintainer, David Airlie of Red Hat, took the stage at Linux Plumbers Conference today to talk about Nouveau and the state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver...

Samba as the open-source re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol for better file and print server interoperability with Microsoft Windows platforms is out with a new release. In the nearly six months since Samba 4.16 was introduced, Samba 4.17 has built up performance improvements/fixes and other enhancements for this widely-used open-source project...

Godot 4.0 Alpha 17 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source game engine. Also announced today that the new start-up W4 Games that was started by Godot Engine developers has managed to raise $8.5M USD to support this open-source game engine ecosystem...

Fedora 37 beta has been successfully released on-time as a development test release ahead of next month's planned stable release...

AMD landed several new GPU firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository this morning for unreleased hardware...

Development on Zink as the OpenGL implementation atop the Vulkan API within Mesa remains very vibrant with a lot of optimizations and other improvements ongoing...

IO_uring continues to prove itself to be one of the most exciting fundamental innovations to the Linux kernel of the past decade. While started for async storage I/O, it has seen recent work around networking use-cases and also driving other innovations like the new "UBD" driver for a IO_uring-based user-space block driver. It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IO_uring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is io_uring_spawn...

TrenchBoot is the project backed by Oracle and other stakeholders for providing a boot-time integrity framework that builds upon boot integrity technologies and roots of trust for ensuring system integrity, network attestation launch, and other security use-cases...

AMDVLK 2022.Q3.4 was published this morning and significant with this new open-source Vulkan driver version is finally seeing ray-tracing support from this driver...

A new open-source driver has been posted for supporting the WMI interface found with newer Dell systems. This platform driver allows for reading battery properties like the temperature and IDs as well as additional fan/thermal sensor information...