Phoronix

Worked on for more than one year is the patches out of Amazon for allowing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. This L1d flushing is done in the name of greater security given the various CPU speculative execution hardware vulnerabilities these days and protecting against other possible future vulnerabilities. After trying to get the code merged last summer, Linus Torvalds called it "beyond stupid" and reverted the code but now for Linux 5.15 a revised form of it was submitted...

For those after an easy-to-use desktop distribution built off Arch Linux, Endeavour OS continues filling the void left by the former Antergos project. Endeavour OS is closing out August by releasing new ISOs that include a number of updates to its installer...

One of the very first pull requests for Linux 5.15 now that its merge window is open following the Linux 5.14 release is to merge KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 protocol file server...

Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions...

As expected Linus Torvalds promoted Linux 5.14 to stable in providing the latest features, hardware support, and other improvements ahead of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution releases...

The Linux hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem for the 5.15 cycle is already seeing the AMD SB-RMI driver and AMD Cezanne Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring while there was also some last-minute additions around AMD next-gen "Yellow Carp" temperature reporting and separately support for another water cooling pump...

While the Linux 5.15 merge window opening is imminent, merged today to net-next were the latest batch of wireless driver updates for this next kernel version. Notable to this batch of WiFi driver updates was the new Intel material...

Near the beginning of the year was some rare work on Linux's floppy disk driver and -- a half-year later -- it was found out that not only do people with systems using floppy disks still move to newer kernels, but that work earlier in the year had regressed the Linux kernel's floppy disk handling. Now coming for Linux 5.15 is a fix...

If all goes according to plan the Linux 5.14 kernel will be released as stable today. Linux 5.14 has many new features but there is also a lot of work slated for the next cycle, Linux 5.15. Here's a look...

The Chrome/Chromium web browser now has fully-enabled the Ozone/X11 platform support across both beta and stable channels...

Here should hopefully be a great indication about AMD's Linux efforts moving forward with one of their recent and exciting hires at the company...

In preparation for the support within their Vulkan driver, the Intel-led effort for preparing mesh shader support within Mesa's NIR and SPIR-V code has now been merged...

It's been a relatively quiet summer in the Wine-Staging world with not many new patches surfacing for testing/experimental purposes for this more bleeding edge version of Wine. However, with Wine-Staging 6.16 there are at least some new patches now to talk about...

The Plasma 5.23 desktop release is looking like it will be quite an eventful milestone while KDE developers are finishing August strong with many improvements and fixes across their desktop stack...

ROCm 4.3 released at the start of August with support for HMM memory allocations, support for indirect function calls and C++ virtual functions with the ROCm compiler, improved data center tool integration, better rocBLAS performance, and a range of other improvements. In approaching the end of August, ROCm 4.3.1 is now available...

Wine 6.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this widely-used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other systems...

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code...

A number of Phoronix readers have been asking about some fresh file-system comparisons on recent kernels. With not having the time to conduct the usual kernel version vs. file-system comparison, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system benchmarks on a speedy WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe solid-state drive...

The Linux kernel has already sported SM4 cipher algorithm implementation optimized for AES-NI and AVX while now an Alibaba engineer has contributed an AVX2 optimized variant for even greater performance...

For nearly the past decade there has been calls for deprecating the Liux kernel's frame-buffer "FBDEV" device code though the code remains within the kernel. While these days most display drivers are DRM-based even in the embedded world, a lot of FBDEV code still ends up in kernel builds even when just wanting to use DRM's FBDEV emulation layer. But a patch proposal out of Red Hat would further split-up the FBDEV core support to allow less of it to be built...