Phoronix

Greg Kroah-Hartman on mailed in the USB/Thunderbolt changes targeting the Linux 5.14 merge window...

There is now covid going around the BSDs... DragonFlyBSD has ported it from NetBSD...

There hasn't been a major X.Org Server release since v1.20 three years ago and not much interest in seeing a new release with more Linux distributions switching to Wayland-based desktops and XWayland recently seeing its own standalone releases. But now there is an X.Org Server 21.1 development release as the first step towards a possible new stable release in the future...

It's coming three years later than originally planned but with Ubuntu 21.10 this autumn the Debian packages will now be compressed via Zstd for offering speedier decompression speeds...

A set of Linux kernel patches to the asus-wmi driver are pending that improve the support for newer ASUS gaming laptops...

Last year I wrote about NVIDIA working on Vulkan support for RDMA memory. That work around RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) memory usage in the Vulkan context is now available with today's Vulkan 1.2.184 specification update...

The tracing subsystem within the Linux kernel is seeing some exciting improvements with Linux 5.14 to help with low-latency analysis and also measuring operating system noise...

The Linux kernel's tooling around the perf subsystem is the latest area seeing a lot of work for Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors with a mix of high performance and low power processor cores...

Merged back in Linux 5.4 in late 2019 was the exFAT file-system driver that has proven to be quite mature at this stage with the work led by Samsung under the blessing of Microsoft. There hasn't been much in the way of exFAT file-system driver changes in recent kernel releases given its maturity. Even with Linux 5.14 there are just two exFAT patches but end up being notable at least for some users due to fixing file-system compatibility with some digital cameras...

This US Independence Day a revised set of patches were mailed out providing support for Rust as a secondary programming language within the Linux kernel for areas where increased security and memory safety are of utmost importance. The set of 17 patches plumb the Linux kernel with initial support, an example driver, and in total amount to more than 33k lines of new code in its early form...

Linux 5.14 is ready to begin supporting some new sound hardware while some recently proposed USB audio latency improvements were rejected for now...

As part of our various Q2'21 and H1'21 Linux/open-source recaps, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news so far this calendar year...

The thermal subsystem updates for the Linux 5.14 kernel include more work on Intel's int340x driver that is used by newer Intel laptops for dealing with their varying thermal control capabilities and exposing more thermal information to user-space for use by Intel's Thermal Daemon (Thermald). This cycle the work includes a new driver that will be used by next-gen Alder Lake SoCs...

GNU Binutils 2.37 has been branched and the release process initiated for these low-level GNU components likely seeing their v2.37 release later this month...

Among the many new features that were sent in so far this week for the Linux 5.14 merge window was the long in-development work on "core scheduling" to reduce the Hyper Threading information leakage risks from side channels and help ensuring deterministic performance on such HT/SMT systems by controlling the resources that can run on a sibling thread. As a follow-up to that article from a few days ago, core scheduling will now be disabled by default...

The Linux kernel's Distributed Lock Manager as a general purpose DLM for kernel and user-space applications with cluster computing systems is seeing a useful reliability improvement with Linux 5.14...

The EXT4 file-system updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window...

Intel open-source engineers continue working on the bring-up around Compute Express Link (CXL) as the new open standard interconnect built off PCIe aiming to empower next-generation servers...

The XFS file-system continues seeing a lot of work cleaning up the kernel driver code as well as some minor feature improvements heading into Linux 5.14...

During the past month were a number of updated Phoronix Test Suite test profiles made available on OpenBenchmarking.org as part of our open-source cross-platform benchmarking framework...