Phoronix

Oracle this morning published the GraalVM Community Edition 22.1 feature release for this high-performance Java/JDK distribution that also provides runtimes for JavaScript, Python, and other languages...

While Intel launched the Arc A-Series Mobile Graphics at the end of Q1, so far at least in major US markets no laptops with these graphics are currently available. As such it's hard to assess the current Linux driver support level and with no clear communication from Intel on the matter. Intel has been working on their upstream DG2/Alchemist support for a while but it looks like with the Linux 5.19 kernel this summer is what will likely be their base version requirement for the DG2/Alchemist-based Intel GPUs...

Back in 2020 file-system driver provider Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel. This driver was previously a proprietary, commercial offering from the company but given the state of NTFS these days they wanted to upstream this driver with full read/write support and other features not found within the existing NTFS driver. Finally last year after going through many rounds of review, the new driver was merged into Linux 5.15. Sadly, less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained...

It looks like Linux 5.19 will have all the base preparations in place for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) support...

Originally attempted with Linux 5.18 were patches so /dev/urandom and /dev/random would behave exactly the same. That was dropped though due to not enough randomness at boot for some platforms like Arm 32-bit, Motorola m68k, Microblaze, Xtensa, and others. But then the change went in to opportunistically initialize /dev/random as a best-effort approach where it at least works nicely on x86/x86_64. The good news is that original unification effort may be re-visited in the future now that the original blocker issue has been addressed...

VMware has merged support for SVGAv3 into Mesa 22.2. SVGAv3 is the latest update to their virtual graphics device for allowing 3D guest virtual machine acceleration with VMware's virtualization products...

In order to fully support Direct3D Indirect Drawing for allowing more rendering tasks to be moved from the CPU to the GPU, the open-source RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is working on experimental code for effectively hosting "a driver on the GPU."..

SDL 2.0.22 is now officially out as the newest version of this widely-used library by multi-platform games and other software for abstracting various input, graphics, and other system details...

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard shared they have setup a GitLab instance for Wine development -- currently as an experiment but they hope it will lead to boosting their workflow for working on this open-source software moving forward...

System76 has released Pop!_OS 22.04 as the newest version of their Linux distribution downstream based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Last week AMD began shipping the much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D as their first 3D V-Cache consumer CPU and their claims to be "the world's fastest PC gaming processor" in being able to outperform even the Core i9 12900K / 12900KS for Windows gaming. We weren't seeded by AMD for this launch, leading us to anticipate that it's not too good for Linux gaming / not their target market. But after the great success I've had with AMD Milan-X performance on Linux, I was very eager to try out this consumer CPU with the 3D-stacked L3 cache and ended up purchasing a 5800X3D. Indeed the Ryzen 7 5800X3D turned out to be disappointing for Linux gaming performance but the 5800X3D was very interesting for a range of other technical workloads and making me very excited for future Ryzen CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

For two years there has been interest and unmerged patches for allowing Linux's plethora of firmware blobs to be Zstd-compressed for helping to save disk space. Finally it looks like for Linux 5.19 that optional Zstd firmware compression support will be merged...

Queued up into the input subsystem's for-next branch ahead of Linux 5.19 is a new driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Joystick...

A NVIDIA engineer is working on addressing the currently "very limited" power management support available with the Linux kernel's upstream VFIO PCI driver...

Open-source friendly game studio Wolfire Games has released their Overgrowth title, which was released back in 2017 and the sequel to the Lugaru game, as open-source software...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc4 and so far the kernel is looking good at this mid-stage of the development cycle...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" LBVH support has landed for boosting the Vulkan ray-tracing potential for this open-source driver. The LBVH patch series is what I reported on earlier this month for at least one workload going from around 13 to 250 FPS boost...

In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has merged support for the JPEG-XL image format...

AMD's open-source Linux engineers on the CPU side of the house continue being quite busy with all sorts of new feature enablement work, which given their timing and other factors is almost all definitively for upcoming Zen 4. AMD this week sent out updated patches in getting "PerfMonV2" support in order that is updated performance monitoring abilities with upcoming processors...