Phoronix

With more organizations such as Alibaba configuring their servers to share CPU cores/resources among applications these days rather than exclusively assigning CPU cores to individual applications/tasks, the Chinese company is proposing a new "group balancer" for the Linux kernel scheduler...

A decade old patch is set to be mainlined in the upcoming Linux 5.17 that has been carried by Google's Chrome OS kernel build for years and can help with security on Linux systems not relying upon systemd's udev...

It was nearly one year ago that Arm announced the Armv9 architecture as the successor to ARMv8 that was introduced a decade ago. Since then Arm has been working on adding Armv9 support to the open-source compilers such as GCC and LLVM/Clang. That initial Armv9 support has been in place for months now while on the LLVM/Clang today it received support for Armv9.3-A as the latest iteration...

Next month marks two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread processor. All of our testing of the 3990X on Linux over the past two years has been with the System76 Thelio Major, which continues holding up well with that US-assembled workstation with hand-crafted enclosure from Colorado. With System76 having recently released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the latest update to their Ubuntu Linux derived operating system and upcoming two year anniversary of the 3990X, it made for an interesting time to see how the performance of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT within that workstation has evolved.

Starting off a new year Intel's open-source compute stack developers have published the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) 1.0.9933 release that is used for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and also used by their graphics driver on Windows...

One of the great successes for Arch Linux in 2021 was "archinstall" debuting on the Arch Linux install media as a convenient and quick installer for this enthusiast-minded Linux distribution. This year that easy Arch Linux installer is getting into even better shape...

A patch series sent out by IBM would introduce a new "LEGACY_PCI" Kconfig option for gating legacy PCI device support, including PCI devices attached to PCI-to-PCIe bridges and PCIe devices using legacy I/O spaces...

Well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly KDE desktop development summaries has published the 2022 road-map for what he sees as the major undertakings this year by this community-driven, open-source desktop environment...

After a reporting snafu over the weekend, Valve has now made available the December 2021 results of the Steam Survey. This metric has been quite interesting to monitor with the increases since Steam Play (Proton) was first introduced but particularly in recent months since the announcement of the Linux-powered Steam Deck causing more excitement around Linux gaming and more people trying out the current state of Steam Play...

The mdadm utility for managing Linux software RAID arrays is out with a new release -- its first in more than three years...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell"...

Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing...

It's coming a few days late due to New Year's, but Wine 7.0-rc4 is out as the latest weekly release candidate for this forthcoming yearly stable release. Wine 7.0 is the imminent feature update for this open-source software allowing Windows games/applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default...

Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux...

Well known Solus Project core team member and Experience Lead Joshua Strobl has announced he is stepping down from the project but will be continuing his work on the Budgie desktop...

The LLVM compiler stack saw record growth in 2021 both with the most amount of new code introduced in any single year as well as the most contributors per year this open-source project has ever seen. Even aside from the development metrics, LLVM had a pretty rocking 2021...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers...

A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level...

While the Linux 5.16 kernel release and in turn the Linux 5.17 merge window isn't happening for another week, the media subsystem pull request for v5.17 has already been mailed out with its various feature changes for this next cycle...