Phoronix

The "virtio-crypto" kernel driver for supporting the VirtIO-spec'ed virtual crypto hardware accelerator for virtual machines is about to offer significantly better performance...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May...

There have been bug reports recently for those using GNOME Shell 42 whether it be the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora (Silverblue) 36 Beta over crashes or blank screens appearing when making use of the Radeon DRM/KMS kernel driver. That older Radeon DRM driver is for pre-GCN 1.2 graphics processors (aside from those on GCN 1.0/1.1 that switch to using the AMDGPU kernel driver with optional module parameters) while now Mutter has landed a fix for this issue...

Two Intel TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) fixes were submitted today ahead of Linux 5.18-rc3 and are also marked for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels. One of the fixes is for addressing a case where systems could still be left vulnerable to the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability and the other is where TSX may not get turned off...

Haiku as the open-source operating system continuing the great work inspired by BeOS remains very active in working to accomplish their goals...

Box86/Box64 is out with new versions today for this open-source project getting x86/x86_64 binaries running on other architectures like Arm and possibly RISC-V and more moving forward. Exciting with Box86 v0.2.6 and Box64 v0.1.8 is getting Steam and Steam Play working for at least the basics...

In time for making your open-source Easter basket is the release of LXQt 1.1 as the newest feature release to this open-source, Qt-based desktop environment born out of the merging of the former Razor-qt and LXDE projects...

While Intel Alder Lake has been out for roughly a half-year now and has been working out well on Linux particularly with v5.16+ kernels, the "intel_idle" driver for CPU idle time management hasn't supported these latest Intel desktop/mobile processors but now there is that support on the way for possible power-savings benefits...

The latest GNU C Library (Glibc) development code this week has begun dropping various SSSE3 optimized code paths...

MediaTek this week posted their initial "request for comments" code on stateless AV1 decoder support for their video codec driver...

Since 2015 the Linux kernel has supported UEFI mirrored memory functionality for x86/x86_64 while now Huawei is working on adding that functionality for AArch64...

GNU Coreutils 9.1 is out this weekend as the latest feature update to these widely-used core utilities on Linux and other platforms with supplying cp, cat, ls, and other common commands...

AMD today sent in an initial batch of new feature code today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle...

As previously talked about on Phoronix with the in-development Linux 5.18 kernel there is a change to the Linux kernel scheduler around the NUMA imbalance handling when spanning multiple LLCs as is the case with AMD Zen CPUs. Already I've carried out benchmarks looking at some of the areas where AMD EPYC CPUs are enjoying speed-ups on Linux 5.18. Since benchmarking the AMD EPYC 7773X with its hefty 1.5GB of L3 cache for 2P servers via AMD 3D V-Cache, I've been curious to try this forthcoming kernel on that Milan-X configuration. Here are such benchmarks looking at the AMD EPYC 7773X 2P performance on Ubuntu 22.04 with its default Linux 5.15 kernel against Linux 5.17 stable and then the 5.18 development kernel.

A new version of Mold has been released, the high-speed open-source linker successfully challenging the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD...

The exFAT file-system driver for the Linux kernel continues maturing nicely with new features, fixes, and performance improvements. The latest Linux exFAT driver improvement worth mentioning is a significant performance improvement from a Sony engineer...

While AMD's official graphics driver on Windows has effectively moved to legacy pre-Polaris graphics card support, in the open-source world on Linux even the old "R600" Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards sees the occasional new feature work by the community. The latest is a new NIR back-end being rewritten for this R600g driver and should debut soon...

This week saw KDE developers tackling many bug fixes to their open-source desktop software with Plasma Wayland fixes still being one of the dominant areas receiving bug fixing attention...

FreeBSD 13.1 is working its way toward release later this month and out today is the second to last release candidate...

Following yesterday's Mesa 22.1 code branching / feature freeze, Mesa 22.1-rc1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards releasing Mesa 22.1 next month. Mesa 22.1 is bringing improvements for old NVIDIA graphics on open-source, many Radeon "RADV" Vulkan enhancements, a lot of work as always on the Intel side, the new Imagination Rogue PowerVR driver, and much more...