Phoronix

Mir continues to be developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical as a set of libraries and Wayland compositor for building Wayland-based shells with integrated window management and other features to ease the bring-up and catering to business use-cases around IoT and digital signage, among other uses. Out today is version 2.4 of Mir with more features and fixes...

Being proposed within the CentOS project is a new special interest group for providing kernel modules not otherwise available within CentOS Stream. This would also include changes around where CentOS / Red Hat disable some kernel modules or artificially limit the scope of supported hardware...

While Wine's bi-weekly development releases are normally in good shape and suitable for Linux gamers and other enthusiasts wanting to run Windows games and applications on Linux or macOS, Wine 6.0.1 is out this week for those sticking to the yearly stable releases with follow-on point releases...

Following last month's release of Qt 6.1, the first point release of this latest Qt6 stable series is now available...

It looks like AMD's rising marketshare in the data center is paying off as AMD is hiring more Linux kernel engineers...

Announced at the end of last year was an experimental Wayland driver for Wine providing native Wayland support without relying on X11/XWayland. In the months since that yet-to-be-merged driver has continued supporting more functionality and with the latest update is much more viable...

As part of the curiosity-driven benchmarks and areas of technical interest now that we've gotten some of our initial Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" benchmarks out of the way has been looking into the performance of Linux's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver on the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server. Benchmarked for the latesting testing was the power/efficiency out-of-the-box with P-State powersave as used by default with many Linux distributions against the P-State "performance" mode as well as putting P-State into passive mode to be able to via intel_cpufreq to try the Schedutil governor that relies on the kernel's scheduler utilization data for making frequency scaling decisions. Here is a number of power/performance governor benchmarks with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server in these varying kernel configurations.

Sadly there isn't much to report on at this time around improved open-source "Nouveau" driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial river. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver...

Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters...

While Qt 6.1 released just one month ago, Qt 6.2 as of today is already into its feature freeze. This quicker than normal time to feature freeze comes due to this year's Qt releases being tightened up following the Qt 6.0 debut at the end of last year. Qt 6.2 will be the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Qt6 series...

Queued up now into the EXT4 file-system's "dev" tree is the recent work on a journal checkpoint ioctl (EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT) and optional support for TRIM/discard or zero-out support on journal flushes. This is the work that came about in recent months in working to ensure the privacy of deleted file names from the system...

Vulkan 1.2.180 is out as the latest revision to this graphics/compute interface. Vulkan 1.2.180 comes with a number of fixes/clarifications to the spec plus the addition of two more extensions...

Linux's RAW driver (RAW_DRIVER) for providing direct I/O access to block devices is finally set to be removed with the Linux 5.14 kernel this summer since its deprecation all the way back in the mid 2000s and its use has been discouraged even longer...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July...

The latest updates to Valve's Proton Experimental build for Steam Play should be offering lower input latency...

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes...

The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM...

In addition to getting Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors ready for the Linux kernel and other areas of the operating system stack, Intel's open-source engineers have continued their trend in recent weeks of upstreaming more Alder Lake work into Coreboot...

Robert McQueen, the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, wrote a post this week ultimately about the GNOME project's need to broaden its focus in order to attract more new users and ultimately to be able to raise funds from new organizations outside of their traditional reach. If they aren't able to find new funding sources, they may need to scale back in some of their efforts but still have a sufficient safety net...

For two years now we have seen various open-source patches around ENQCMD instructions for the code compilers and the Linux kernel. This Enqueue Stores support is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids". But even with Sapphire Rapids not launching until later this year, the already merged Linux kernel code is force-disabling the ENQCMD instructions support as the current kernel support is deemed "broken beyond repair" and will need to be reworked...