Phoronix

One of the most prominent additions to the Linux 5.17 kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver akin to Intel's P-State driver and aims to deliver better energy efficiency than AMD Zen 2 and newer processors currently on the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With Linux 5.18 an AMD P-State tracer tool is to be included with the kernel source tree for helping to analyze and tune this new driver...

We are a little more than one week away from the official GNOME 42.0 desktop release and packages are beginning to prepare their "v42.0" releases...

Back in February PostgreSQL began working on Zstd compression support and now with the latest code changes of the past week, this modern compression algorithm developed at Facebook is now able to play a greater role with this leading open-source database server...

Axis Communications on Friday published "Roadtest" as their initial patch-set for this new Linux driver testing framework...

Going along with the recent patches to stop building a.out support for Linux's Alpha and m68k architecture ports as the last of the CPU architectures that were still building the kernel with the support enabled, developers are ready to remove the x86 a.out support outright...

KDE developers remain very busy and productive even with everything going on in the world. This week the KDE desktop enjoyed many more fixes and improvements across the board...

Wine 7.4 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Made public this week was the Spectre-BHB / BHI vulnerability and while only Intel and Arm processors are currently believed to be impacted, in the course of that research the folks at VUSec discovered AMD's current Retpoline strategy for Spectre V2 mitigations is not adequate. This has led to a change in behavior for AMD processors and is already applied to the Linux kernel. Here is a look at what it means for desktop and server performance due to the change in return trampoline handling.

For AMD Navi "RDNA1" GPUs and newer having at least Video Core Next 2.0 (VCN2) for the video coding block, a new feature was merged today into Mesa 22.1-devel for the open-source AMD video acceleration stack...

Linux 5.17 will hopefully be released on Sunday and with that next kernel there are many exciting features in tow. But for as great as Linux 5.17 is, there are many features I am already eager for with Linux 5.18. Here is an early look at a number of the changes expected in this next kernel version...

In addition to releasing FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1, the FreeBSD project also published its Q4'2021 status report to recap all of the open-source activities achieved for this BSD operating system during the past quarter...

Back in 2019 that seems like an eternity ago with all that's gone on in the world, the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support. This executable / object code / shared library file format was used prior to the dominance of ELF but is seldom if ever used today. There have been pending patches to finally remove a.out from the kernel while the plan now is to stop building it on Alpha and Motorola 68000 targets to see if anyone notices/cares...

Out today is the first beta release of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.1 operating system update...

OpenZFS 2.1.3 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation compatible with modern Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Made public on Tuesday was BHI / Spectre-BHB as the newest offshoot from Spectre V2. There were Linux patches immediately posted for affected Intel and Arm processors while also making adjustments to AMD CPUs around its Retpoline handling. The VUSec security researchers that discovered BHI are recommending Retpolines be enabled for newer processors even those with hardware mitigations against Spectre V2, but that's that performance cost? Here are some initial benchmarks.

AMD posted this morning a new Linux kernel patch series for enabling a new feature for "upcoming processors" that is almost definitively for Zen 4, continuing their work in recent weeks around more open-source patches in preparing for their next-generation processors...

When Linus Torvalds gets motivated and behind kernel changes, they tend to happen more quickly, with the latest example being the switching from the C89 language standard to C11 (GNU11). That change is now expected early on for the Linux 5.18 merge window...

Assuming nothing major comes up in the next few days, the Linux 5.17 kernel is expected to be released on Sunday. While we have been covering Linux 5.17 kernel activity already for a while prior to the merge window even getting going, here is a convenient look at some of the most interesting changes to find in this new release...

A set of 13 patches were posted overnight for improving the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver's handling of the power-savings feature Display Refresh Rate Switching (DRRS) for laptops...

MorphOS as the AmigaOS-like operating system now in development for more than two decades and targeting PowerPC hardware is out with version 3.16 as its first major release in over a year...