Phoronix

Intel's Linux enablement work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) continues for better securing virtual machines on future Intel hardware platforms...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc6 to cap off the week that he describes as "nobody can claim that last week was *normal*, but whatever crazy things are going on in the world (and I personally had "Zombieapocalypse" on my bingo card, not "Putin has a mental breakdown"), it doesn't seem to have affected the kernel much."..

As noted last week there were Linux developers discussing the idea of removing the ReiserFS file-system given that it hasn't been really relevant in more than a decade and is very unlikely to be used still in production use-cases with modern kernels. It looks like the deprecation will move forward but the actual removal from the mainline kernel won't happen until 2025...

While free software developer Con Kolivas is known for his work on the Linux kernel to improve desktop responsiveness and efforts like BFS and MuQSS, there is also user-space software he has developed. One of those user-space programs under is belt is LRZIP, the Long Range ZIP format, that is focused on providing speedy compression of large files and to do so with lower amounts of memory...

Coreboot 4.16 is out this weekend as the newest quarterly release for this project striving for open-source system firmware / BIOS replacements...

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends...

According to the Coreboot camp, future Intel systems with FSP 3.0 and Universal Scalable Firmware (USF) will be even less friendly for open-source system firmware...

Already for the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel cycle on the AMDGPU driver side has been preparations for new hardware blocks presumably coming with RDNA3 GPUs, FreeSync Video Mode by default, and other changes. As likely the last "feature" pull of AMDGPU material for Linux 5.18, another pull request to DRM-Next was submitted on Friday...

NVIDIA's Orin SoC with twelve Cortex-A78AE CPU cores and Ampere graphics should be quite a strong offering when it's more broadly available later this year. This "Tegra234" SoC has been seeing work on enabling it with the mainline Linux kernel and the latest fruit of that work is a new HDA audio driver set for introduction with Linux 5.18...

China's Loongson has posted their latest set of patches for enabling their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture for the Linux kernel...

KDE developers are surely celebrating this weekend now that Valve's Steam Deck is shipping and KDE Plasma is the default desktop in the "developer mode". But in any event it's been another busy week for KDE developers with fixes and improvements to their open-source desktop stack...

Wine 7.3 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for enjoying Windows games and applications running on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Following last summer's release of Firewalld 1.0, out today is Firewalld 1.1 as the next major update to this Linux firewall daemon...

Over the past nearly 18 years of running Phoronix, I have come across many interesting Linux-based products from Linux embedded in motherboards for instant-on use to the BlackDog USB port pen drive Linux servers to solar-powered super-computers in trash cans. The most fun and promising Linux-powered gaming device for the masses though is launching today: Valve's Steam Deck. I've been fortunate to be testing out this Arch Linux derived handheld game console the past month and it has been working out very well -- both as a portable Steam gaming device but making it even more compelling from the Linux enthusiast angle is its "developer mode" that effectively turns it into a general Linux handheld and also being free to load your own Linux distribution of choice.

Fwupd 1.7.6 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for facilitating system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

The AMD HSMP kernel driver is currently under review for possible inclusion into the Linux 5.18 cycle. HSMP in this context is the Host System Management Port...

We are now one step closer to the long overdue GIMP 3.0 release as the GTK3, much improved version of this open-source alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop...

It was just with Linux 5.17 that its RISC-V code adds "sv48" support for being able to handle more system memory by offering 48-bit virtual address space support. Now for Linux 5.17 there is "sv57" support prepared for 57-bit virtual address space support with five level page table handling...

The Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite immutable OS spins of Fedora Linux are looking at mounting /sysroot read-only by default for where the operating system assets are stored...

Intel on Wednesday sent in another batch of i915 kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.18 merge window...