Phoronix

In July -- the same month as Valve announcing the Steam Deck -- the Steam on Linux marketshare hit 1.0%. That 1.0% marketshare was a +0.14% bump and the highest seen in years since Steam on Linux's debut nearly a decade ago back when it commanded around a 2% marketshare...

We've been covering Genode OS for more than a decade now as this original open-source operating system "framework" and through this time they have managed to keep up with their routine feature releases. Out this week is Genode OS Framework 21.08 as they seek to make it easier porting device driver code to their platform...

Very large IBM mainframes/servers were taking 30+ minutes to boot the Linux kernel... No, just not for POST'ing the system with memory training and the like, but for loading Linux. Fortunately, with the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a set of scalability enhancements to allow these large IBM systems to be able to boot in around five minutes...

The staging updates for Linux 5.15 continue to have a lot of code churn including some drivers being promoted while one Realtek WiFi driver has been replaced...

While Microsoft announced that Windows 11 will be formally released on 5 October, rolling out today is general availability on Windows Server 2022...

Intel's i965 classic DRI driver is still the default within Mesa for i965 through Haswell generations of Intel integrated graphics, but the new "Crocus" Gallium3D driver has been added to the default driver build list so it's now at least building by default on x86/x86_64 systems and thus trivial after that to override...

The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support...

RadeonSI Gallium3D as the official AMD OpenGL Linux driver has mirrored the unofficial RADV Vulkan driver in enabling DCC stores support for RDNA2 APUs in the name of greater performance...

Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area...

In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...

The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed...

For being a summer month, August was much busier than usual with a slew of exciting hardware and Linux/open-source software announcements. From releasing Linux 5.14 in marking 30 years of the Linux kernel to the debut of Debian 11 to Valve Steam Deck related work to their exciting sponsorship of Zink work, August was quite an exciting month for Linux enthusiasts...

Google is shipping Chrome 93 today as the latest stable version of their web browser...

Mike Blumenkrantz in addition to addressing that big performance problem with Tesseract and other Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan improvements in recent days has now landed OpenGL ES 3.2 support...

The Btrfs file-system updates have landed now in Linux 5.15 mainline with some exciting new features and improvements...

One of the earliest pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 5.15 cycle was proposing KSMBD land as the in-kernel SMB3 file server as an alternative on Linux systems to running Samba in user-space. At the time it wasn't clear if Linus Torvalds would pull in this file server code to the Linux kernel but now he has indeed landed it...

GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu was released today as the project's re-base on the recently released Linux 5.14 upstream kernel. But prior supported GNU Linux-libre releases also had to be re-spun as it turned out this "100% free software" kernel was mistakenly leaving in some non-free kernel bits...

It's been a while since last running benchmarks evaluating the performance of GCC's profile guided optimizations (PGO) for helping to optimize the performance. But stemming from the discussions around PGO'ing the Linux kernel (though that effort is stalled for now), several Phoronix readers inquired about seeing some fresh PGO figures with GCC 11. So here are such benchmarks of GCC 11 with the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 running on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X desktop.

With the Linux 5.15 kernel is a new build-time option to further harden the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling this option can have some (small) performance cost and a slightly larger kernel...