Phoronix

While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged...

KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session...

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...

Landing via Andrew Morton's patch series today in the Linux 5.15 kernel is handling for demoting pages during memory reclaim, which can be used for punting cold pages off to slower, tiered memory devices (like Intel persistent memory) when under system memory pressure...

It looks like Paragon Software's NTFS3 kernel driver providing much better Linux support for the Microsoft NTFS file-system will land for the 5.15 kernel!..

The last release of Gzip was v1.10 back at the end of 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded today by Gzip 1.11...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is a new option for further protecting the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling the option will ensure that any caller-used register contents are zeroed prior to returning from a function. While the reported performance cost is said to be small, I decided to run some benchmarks when toggling this new Kconfig hardening option.

Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps...

The Freedesktop SDK as a platform and SDK run-time for Flatpak apps/run-times is out with its first major stable update in one year...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has upstreamed its GNU Binutils support...

The latest security effort being pursued by Google's Kees Cook is to provide full compile-time and run-time coverage of all detectable buffer overflows...

While Linux 5.15 has added KSMBD as an SMB3 in-kernel file server, the NFS code within the Linux kernel continues advancing as well for network file sharing needs. With NFS in Linux 5.15 are a few notable improvements...

Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper...

The GCC compiler when using the default "-O2" optimization level is likely to be slightly faster with next year's GCC 12 release as the developers are looking at enabling the vectorizer options by default...

Last month were our benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on Linux for that new desktop APU with Zen 3 cores and Vega graphics available through retail channels. Due to reader interest and with the Ryzen 5 5600G still readily available via Internet retailers, here is a look at the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Linux performance in a variety of benchmarks.

It's busy on the Linux file-system front for the 5.15 cycle woth Btrfs adding a degenerate RAID option along with performance improvements to big improvements for XFS and now comes the EXT4 updates...

The Arm SoC and platform updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel...

Last week I wrote about AMD adding 17 more RDNA2 PCI IDs to their Linux driver which is rather unusual given the amount and the number of PCI IDs already found in the AMDGPU kernel driver for these latest-generation GPUs and the Radeon RX 6000 series already being mid-life. As noted in that article and seemingly in agreement with the various other industry articles following that Phoronix news, it seems to be for some sort of RDNA2 refresh likely. Now those new PCI IDs are being queued up for introduction in the current Linux 5.15 cycle...

When the Qt 6.0 tool-kit debuted last year much of the early criticism stemmed around it not having all the modules/functionality ported over from Qt5 meanwhile The Qt Company was restricting newer Qt 5.15 LTS point releases to paying customers only. Since then the developers have been working to address the voids in Qt6 and with the upcoming Qt 6.2 as their next long-term support release, all of the important functionality should be in place...

The sound/audio drivers have landed for the ongoing Linux 5.15 kernel driver...