Phoronix

In kicking off SUSECON, SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4. Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month and is under active development and has a long road ahead before it's even feasible for upstreaming into the mainline kernel...

Intel Meteor Lake as the successor to Raptor Lake has begun seeing Coreboot enablement work by Intel engineers...

While Docker can already run on AArch64 Linux, the mainline Linux kernel's default configuration "defconfig" lacks a few features for allowing it to run out-of-the-box. An Arm engineer is proposing adjusting those defaults to make it more easily/straight-forward to run Docker on 64-bit Arm...

Somewhat surprisingly, the open-source SDL library that is widely used by games for cross-platform handling and abstracting of various software interfaces has added a Microsoft DirectX 12 renderer...

Ikey Doherty started the Solus Linux distribution then disappeared and wrote an open letter on Phoronix about his absence, also was employed by Intel for a year to work on their Clear Linux distribution, had a brief stint starting a game/software development company, and then started the Serpent OS Linux distribution. He's still been working on Serpent OS but then was working full-time elsewhere but now has decided to return full-time to working on his latest Linux distribution...

In addition to announcing the M2 SoC, Apple used its WWDC keynote to also announce macOS 13 "Ventura". One of the interesting technical changes with macOS 13 is the ability to use Apple's Rosetta software for speedy execution of Linux x86_64 binaries running on ARM Linux VMs from Apple Silicon...

Apple's WWDC keynote this year was used to announce the M2 processor alongside a slew of other announcements...

In addition to Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver prepared for mesh shading with an upcoming Vulkan mesh shader extension besides NVIDIA's NV_mesh_shader, it looks like AMD will be punctually supporting the cross-vendor mesh shader extension too...

With Panfrost Gallium3D patches landing today into Mesa 22.2 and Panfrost DRM kernel driver support slated to land for the Linux 5.20 cycle later this summer, the Mali G57 GPU has conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 support on this open-source driver and the first Mali GPU of the Valhall generation to have this achievement following the Panfrost driver's successes for the older Bifrost and Midgard architectures...

Last month Python 3.11 Beta 1 was released as their first preview of this major update to the Python programming language. Besides new language features and other improvements, Python 3.11 performance is looking fantastic with very nice performance uplift over prior Python 3.x releases.

With the Linux 5.19 merge window complete, here is my usual look at all of the interesting changes I've been watching for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 5.19 is quite a big summer time upgrade to this open-source kernel with many new and improved features coming for this kernel that will debut as stable in late July.

A last minute change sent in on Sunday and merged prior to Linux 5.19-rc1 disables late microcode loading by default for x86/x86_64 processors over its sad state of affairs...

It's not only the Linux kernel that's been seeing some spring cleaning but Mesa developers have also been quite busy on working to remove some old, poorly maintained code from their open-source 3D driver components...

Following a rather eventful Linux 5.19 merge window the past two weeks, Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc1. It's a great way coincidentally to mark the end of the Phoronix 18th birthday...

While just a day prior Linus Torvalds was questioning the proposed "HTE" subsystem, today on this final day of the Linux 5.19 merge window he decided to land this new subsystem...

It was eighteen years ago today that I started Phoronix.com to focus on Linux hardware reviews. Back then it was difficult getting peripherals working under Linux from 56k modems to printers and other components today where Linux support can just be assumed. Open-source graphics drivers back then were also in their infancy and lacking vendor support while NVIDIA was well regarded then for their proprietary driver being at least featureful and performant. It's been quite a journey...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent in the USB/Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.19 kernel that is seeing its merge window end today. With the USB updates, Greg had some remarks on the DWC3 Linux driver that will likely "never be finished" given that this USB IP is appearing in lots of hardware but not consistently being implemented and thus continuing to require a lot of adaptations on the driver side...

Last month Microsoft published their first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as an updated version of their in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes from Windows Subsystem for Linux to Azure. This week Microsoft released a rather hefty stable update to their CBL-Mariner 2.0 distribution...

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday submitted the "char/misc" changes for the Linux 5.19 kernel. Char/misc continues to be the "catch all" area of the kernel for drivers and code not fitting formally within other kernel subsystems. Leading on this front for Linux 5.19 is the introduction of the Apple eFuse driver for M1 systems and Intel-owned Habana Labs continues improving their AI accelerator driver...

FEX-Emu 2206 has been released as the newest version of this user-space, open-source software for being able to run x86/x86_64 applications and games on AArch64 (Arm) hardware...