Phoronix

OpenBLAS as the popular open-source implementation of the BLAS and LAPACK APIs is out with a new feature release...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc5 as another weekly test version of Linux 5.17 that will debut as stable in March...

Thanks to Red Hat engineer Jelle van der Waa, the hid-razer driver is set to be merged into Linux 5.18 next month for dealing with Razer hardware not complying with the HID standard...

Intel's Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) driver is ready to be merged for the Linux 5.18 kernel now that it's been queued into the x86 platform driver's "for-next" branch...

Last month Intel posted a new set of Linux patches for shadow stack support as part of the Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) found within their latest processors. Also part of Intel's CET is Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) while Intel said they were going to first focus on shadow stack (SS) and worry about IBT later. Less than one month later, new Indirect Branch Tracking patches for the Linux kernel have been taking shape...

Mesa's Virgl code as part of the Virgil 3D GPU project allows for OpenGL/3D acceleration within QEMU virtual machines with the driver calls then being passed onto the host GPU. Mesa's Virgl code to this stage has relied upon the Gallium3D TGSI intermediate representation while they are working on moving it to the modern and superior NIR...

Following the nasty local privilege escalation vulnerability that was disclosed last month for Polkit's pkexec, Fedora developers are hoping to make pkexec optional later this year with Fedora 37...

Libinput 1.20 is out today as the first update since last September to this widely-used Linux input handling library that is relied on both within X.Org and Wayland powered desktops...

Building off last week's Radeon graphics driver updates for Linux 5.18 that included introducing AMDKFD CRIU and enabling FreeSync Video Mode by default, Friday evening brought a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version...

While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support...

Intel's forthcoming Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards do support Resizable BAR functionality as covered when they previously published Linux patches for it. They are also now working on a DG2 feature for "small BAR" support...

It's been a while since last hearing anything of Linux block subsystem maintainer's Jens Axboe crusade on achieving the maximum possible IOPS-per-core. However, on Friday he was out with his latest insight in still declaring Intel's Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor as being the king of IOPS-per-core performance at nearly 13M IOPS per CPU core...

KDE developers had a very busy Valentine's week with working on more fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.24 as well as making early progress on Plasma 5.25 and improving KDE apps and other areas of their open-source desktop environment...

AMD today pushed updated Family 19h / Zen 3 CPU microcode to the linux-firmware.git tree...

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers have been working on the driver support for new graphics processors and now the patches are at the earliest stages of publishing. However, due to driver handling changes, it's sharply different this time around where in the past they volleyed a big set of patches under some colorful fishy codename in an effort to conceal their hardware enablement work...

While AMD EPYC processors already deliver great performance under Linux, with the Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is a scheduler improvement that can provide measurable speed-ups for various workloads on processors where there are multiple last level caches (LLCs) per node, such as with the case of EPYC...

Building off Intel graphics driver code already staged for the upcoming Linux 5.18 merge window, another round of feature changes were sent in this week to DRM-Next for adding to the queue ahead of this next kernel cycle...

While the X.Org Foundation didn't participate in Google Summer of Code last year amid GSoC project changes, with this year's GSoC design having incorporate feedback from last year's changes, X.Org is hoping to once again participate in this summer initiative that sees student developers contribute to and engage with open-source projects. So far under the X.Org umbrella there is one project idea being solicited that has willing mentors and that is for improving the unit testing coverage of the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Red Hat's David Airlie continues carrying out almost magical work on the open-source Linux graphics stack. Reviving some work he originally started a while back, patches pending for Mesa allow speeding up the software-based LLVMpipe OpenGL driver for vertex and fragment shader processing...

Google in cooperation with AOMedia this week released the AOM-AV1 v3.3 encoder for this royalty-free video codec...