Phoronix

While Intel is normally quite good with their new hardware support being in good shape well ahead of launch, their new code for supporting the ENQCMD functionality for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" has been an exception. This summer the mainline Linux kernel disabled ENQCMD support since the code was "broken beyond repair" while now Intel engineers have sent out a new series looking to get it re-enabled...

An Open Printing micro-conference took place today during the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 week. While it's hard to get excited about printers in 2021, it is exciting the renewed effort around CUPS with it now being back to effectively led by the community and CUPS founder Michael Sweet who left Apple. CUPS 2.4 is coming as the first feature release in quite a while and then CUPS 2.5 followed by CUPS 3.0 are already being talked about with features being discussed...

OpenVPN has been implementing a kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to enhance the performance of this virtual private network system...

NVIDIA has released their latest 470 series Linux driver point release...

DXVK 1.9.2 is out as the newest version of this key library necessary to the success of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) by translating Direct3D 9/10/11 calls to Vulkan for a much more performant Windows gaming experience on Linux...

While Oktoberfest was once again cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic (then again, due to the state of the ad industry / ad-block users we haven't had any European meet-up / open-source gathering in years), the wiesn would have kicked off this past weekend. So as is tradition, there is the Phoronix Premium Oktoberfest sale where you can join the ad-free service as a reduced rate. If you enjoy the daily, original Linux and open-source content on Phoronix with plenty of benchmarking, you can do so at a reduced rate...

With the m68k community continuing to be active around supporting the vintage Motorola 68000 series with modern open-source software, Rust has now merged support for these old processors...

Earlier this year AMD went public with prototyping CRIU support for Radeon GPUs around ROCm to be able to checkpoint/freeze running compute workloads and to then restore them at a later point. This CRIU focus is driven by their big accelerator needs and forthcoming supercomputers for migrating workloads particularly within containers. AMD continues working on CRIU support for GPUs and last week provided an update on the project...

NVIDIA is contributing a new open-source driver to the upstream Linux kernel for dealing with upcoming laptops where the backlight controls are handled by the device's embedded controller (EC)...

Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features. Fedora Workstation 35 is shaping up to be another great release for those interested in a feature-rich desktop experience...

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, xf86-input-libinput 1.2 is now available for integrating the latest functionality of libinput input handling library...

Linux 5.15-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 5.15 in turn should be out as stable around the start of November...

HarfBuzz 3.0 has been released as a new version of this widely-used, open-source text shaping library that is used by the major Linux desktop environments along with Chrome OS, Java, Android, Chrome, and a plethora of other software projects and UI toolkits...

It was just a few weeks back that KSMBD was merged into Linux 5.15 while now it's seeing its first important security fix...

With a change to the nct6775 hardware monitoring sensor driver, more ASUS motherboards should enjoy working sensor support come Linux 5.16...

Jolla this week released Sailfish OS 4.2 "Verla" as the newest version of this Linux-based smartphone operating system that continues to be made commercially available for various devices...

The recently released SDL 2.0.16 brought much-improved Wayland support but it's still not quite good enough yet to have it be the default over the SDL X11 path. However, developers continue working in that direction to eventually use it by default...

One has to wonder how much longer the Linux kernel will keep around some very old and known to be borked hardware support but at least for now the DECpc AXP 150 "Jensen" platform support is sticking around and with Linux 5.15 is no longer marked as "broken" outright...

BayLibre developer Alexandre Bailon has posted a "request for comments" of a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for AI Processing Unit (APU) functionality. Initially the driver is catering to Mediatek SoCs with an AI co-processor but this DRM "APU" driver could be adapted to other hardware too...

The latest patches sent out for review/testing on the long mission for enabling Apple M1 support on Linux is the USB Type-C connectivity...