Phoronix

While Ampere Altra and Altra Max processors are achieving great success using Arm Neoverse N1 based cores, as shared earlier this year Ampere has begun designing their own custom Arm server CPU cores for slated introduction in 2022. The first GCC compiler patch for that next-gen Ampere CPU was quietly posted on Monday...

After going through a number of rounds of patch revisions over the past year, Intel's kernel-side changes for supporting Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) with next-gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors has landed for Linux 5.16!..

Back in July Steam on Linux re-crossed the 1.0% marketshare threshold following the announcement of the Steam Deck and continued progress around Steam Play / Proton. The Steam on Linux user-base has continued growing month by month and has hit another high with the numbers published today that cover the month of October...

AMD today released Radeon Open eCosystem 4.5 (ROCm 4.5) as the latest version to their open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems. ROCm 4.5 brings with it a number of new features and improvements but one area on the consumer Radeon side will leave some potential users frustrated...

The proposed memory "folios" functionality for Linux 5.16 is happening! This low-level change to the Linux memory management code was merged today for this next kernel...

Making rounds today are the "Trojan Source" attacks by which text displayed to the end-user/developer doesn't match what is actually being executed. The problem stems from Unicode standards and could lead to malicious code being inadvertently introduced into upstream code-bases that could be overlooked during code review processes, etc. GCC and LLVM/Clang are among the early compilers preparing defenses against Trojan Source style attacks...

The big set of block changes for Linux 5.16 were merged today with the opening of the new kernel cycle. While the massive I/O optimizations tackled recently has been a main focus, there is also much more to the block subsystem coming with Linux 5.16...

MPV 0.34 is now available as the newest version of this popular Linux video player that is powered by FFmpeg and forked originally from MPlayer/mplayer2 code...

Linux 5.16 is adjusting its default Spectre mitigation behavior around Spectre V2 for user-space tasks as well as Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) for Spectre V4 mitigation...

Google announced today that now through at least the end of January they will be providing higher payment amounts for security researchers disclosing new vulnerabilities affecting the Linux kernel...

FWUPD 1.7.1 is out today as the newest release of this leading open-source solution for allowing firmware updates from UEFI motherboards to various peripherals under Linux and other platforms...

As we approach the end of the calendar year there was some uncertainty whether Linux 5.15 would be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel or if it would be Linux 5.16 albeit not likely releasing until the start of 2022.....

PHPStan 1.0 was released today as the first stable release for this leading open-source PHP static analysis tool...

As expected after first reporting on it a month ago when the FUTEX2 patches were queued up in locking/core, this work with the new sys_futex_waitv() system call for helping the Windows on Linux gaming experience will indeed land for Linux 5.16...

It was an exciting October even amid the ongoing pandemic as at least Linux/open-source enthusiasts were able to enjoy the Ubuntu 21.10 debut, ongoing Linux I/O optimizations many of which are now coming to mainline in 5.16, numerous AMD driver enhancements, NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack finally introducing GBM support, X.Org Server 21.1 released, and much more...

Right after last night's Linux 5.15 kernel release, the Free Software Foundation folks issued GNU Linux-libre 5.15-gnu as the newest version of their downstream that removes functionality dependent upon binary-only/non-free-software firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load closed kernel modules and other determined non-free-software restrictions...

Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week...

Back in September at the end of the Linux 5.15 merge window was our Linux 5.15 feature overview but given the time since then and that the Linux 5.15 stable kernel will likely be released this evening, here is a recap of the most interesting changes in this new kernel version...

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a decade-old project that forked from the KDE 3.5 desktop continues persevering bit-by-bit to improve this once widely enjoyed desktop environment...

After memory folios failed to make it into Linux 5.15, this low-level change to the kernel memory management code that has possible performance implications is looking to land for Linux 5.16...