Phoronix

As a public service announcement for those using the "MESA_GLSL_CACHE" environment variable for controlling where your graphics driver shader cache resides or using "MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE" for forcing off this on-disk shader cache, the environment variables have been renamed...

Back in late 2020 it was originally talked about for Canonical's effort around Snap packages to switch to LZO compression for faster start-up times. Today they published a new blog post on the Ubuntu site highlighting the Snap speed-ups while looking at KDE packages. The LZO-compressed packages are faster than XZ indeed, but still rather a lengthy start-up time for cold apps...

AMD's Radeon Linux graphics driver developers are looking at enhancing the GPU reset experience so more information about the troublesome event can be communicated up the stack for better informing the user and/or taking greater action to ensure the desktop gets successfully restored...

The latest Linux kernel patch activity out of AMD in preparation for next-generation "Zen 4" processors is enabling AMD Performance Monitoring Version Two "PerfMonV2" support...

After revolutioning Linux storage I/O, the kernel's IO_uring interface is continuing to be buffed into shape for handling Linux networking needs too...

As part of wanting to drop unused i686 package builds from Fedora Linux, Fedora developers -- and in particular the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee -- want to know from the community what i686 (x86 32-bit) packages users still make use of...

Arm continues working on improving the open-source compiler support for their forthcoming Armv9 processor designs. The latest to report on is the tuning additions for the Neoverse-N2 and Neoverse "Demeter" targets...

Keith Packard continues developing Picolibc as his C standard library alternative to the likes of Musl and uClibc for a libc implementation that runs well on embedded hardware, especially for platforms with limited amounts of RAM...

The 64-bit Arm (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code updates have been submitted ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window opening next week...

QEMU 7.0 is working its way towards release as an important component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings with it many notable new features and changes for this open-source processor emulator...

Mesa developer Mike Blumenkrantz who is employed by Valve and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan work has recently been working on enhancements to Lavapipe...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has now added support for the recently published VK_VALVE_descriptor_set_host_mapping Vulkan extension...

Go 1.18 is out today as a significant update to this Google-backed programming language while continuing to still maintain Go 1.x compatibility...

It's been expected for many months now, but Google today at their Game Developer Summit keynote formally announced that Valve's Steam gaming client is coming to Chrome OS...

AMD today announced the ship date and suggested pricing for their much anticipated Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor as well as new Ryzen 7/5/3 series processors...

Intel announced today their initial investment of over €33 billion into the EU as part of their IDM 2.0 strategy...

Published at the start of the new year was 2.3k patches providing "fast kernel headers" as a major speed-up to Linux kernel build times and addressing the dependency hell among all the header files in the Linux kernel source tree. It will likely take some time for that massive patch series to work its way to mainline in full, but at least for Linux 5.18 already the patches touching the kernel's scheduler area are ready to land...

Earlier this month AMD began publishing code for their "GFX940" graphics block as a new CDNA GPU, presumably what will be the AMD Instinct MI300 series as their next-gen datacenter GPU. More GFX940 open-source driver enablement work is getting underway...

While there have already been a number of vulnerabilities exhibited for Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) from Prime+Probe to Plundervolt, Spectre-like attacks, SGAxe, and others, it looks like they expect more still to come in the future. Intel engineers are working on the ability for SGX to gracefully handle live CPU microcode updates without a reboot, which these days is increasingly driven for security mitigations and system administrators wanting to apply said updates right away while foregoing downtime...

It's been nearly one year since Microsoft published CBL-Mariner 1.0 as their internal Linux distribution in use at the WIndows company. Microsoft continues building upon CBL-Mariner and using it for a variety of use-cases from within Azure (for Sphere OS) to WSL and much more. They continue publishing monthly ISO releases for those wanting to use this Microsoft Linux spin for their own uses...