Phoronix

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have now committed the DG2/Alchemist graphics card PCI IDs and device information data to Mesa 22.0 for their OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, but for now until the Linux kernel support is baked this is disabled...

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced the DXGKRNL driver as the kernel driver component for supporting GPU accelerated use-cases within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). That original DXGKRNL driver was quickly shot down by upstream kernel developers and various issues raised while now for the past year Microsoft has been reworking this kernel driver and on Wednesday published the new version...

Being worked on since early 2020 by Red Hat's David Howells has been a rewrite to Linux's FS-Cache and CacheFiles code focusing on making it smaller and simpler while also presenting possible memory/performance advantages. That major rewrite has been merged now for Linux 5.17...

Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks...

The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation "SLS" mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow...

Formally announced at CES, the Core i5 12400 and other Alder Lake non-K desktop CPUs are beginning to appear in retail channels. Last week I was able to buy an Intel Core i5 12400 "Alder Lake" from a major Internet retailer for $209 USD -- and one week later there remains availability during these turbulent supply chain times. The i5-12400 has wound up being a very nice processor for Linux use that exceeded my initial expectations.

It's not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17.....

In addition to the prompt support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, another exciting milestone for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing mainline support for the StarFive JH7100, which has been trying to make its debut as the first usable and low-cost RISC-V platform...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler...

Qualcomm only announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and X65 platforms at the end of November but already they have managed to provide timely mainline support for these latest high-end SoCs. This is great to see compared to the days of slow to materialize mainline support for new Arm SoCs, which still persists among some vendors with either belated mainline support or only focusing on vendor downstream kernels. The big batch of Arm SoC/platform changes have landed for Linux 5.17...

A patch merged into Mesa 22.0 on Tuesday for Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is helping bump up the perforrmance in modern games...

Over the past two years work has been ramping up a lot on Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel and with the in-development Linux 5.17 there is more feature code landing...

The GNOME Shell and Mutter have checked in their new development releases for the imminent GNOME 42 Alpha milestone...

In addition to the Btrfs updates, the EXT4 and XFS file-system maintainers submitted their feature changes already for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel...

Merged into LLVM's mono repository minutes ago was BOLT! This is the Facebook-developed tool for optimizing the layout of binaries in the name of delivering greater performance. Facebook (now Meta) already has been using BOLT internally to great success with production workloads, it's continued advancing in the public as open-source for a while, and is now upstream in LLVM for fostering its future development...

The Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda installer for carrying out new operating system installs is in the early stages of a major rewrite to its user-interface and moving forward will be web-based...

While PCIe 5.0 adoption is only in its infancy, the PCI-SIG today announced the PCIe 6.0 specification...

In addition to announcing the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card this morning, NVIDIA has published their first public beta of the new NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series...

While RADV is not AMD's official Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems, for Mesa 22.0 they have contributed a set of optimizations to improve the "DRI_PRIME" performance for hybrid GPU setups such as the growing number of AMD powered notebooks with discrete graphics...