Svobodný software

Last week I wrote about Linux developers evaluating a new "DOITM" security mitigation for the latest Intel CPUs. While the cost for now of engaging the Data Operand Independent Timing Mode (DOITM) functionality is minimal, following internal Intel engineering discussions it looks like the Linux kernel patches will need to be re-worked with this functionality not intended to always be enabled...

Now that we are into February with AMD previously announced the month for learning more about their new Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache, this morning they revealed the firm availability dates and pricing...

As scheduled, version 2.37 of the GNU C Library "glibc" was released this morning...

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they've made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards...

The last batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.3 merge window. Notable with this week's changes are more low-level code improvements in preparation for future Intel graphics hardware platforms...

Now that Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" shipped and the initial Linux support is all aligned, recently there has been an uptick in activity around Emerald Rapids and even Granite Rapids as its successor along with the Sierra Forest support. On the EMR front, the latest Linux driver activity is extending the In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for additional testing capabilities...

An optimization to Mesa's shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam's shader pre-caching...

During the course of this month on Phoronix were 224 original news articles pertaining to Linux / open-source / hardware and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews...

One of the new features introduced with Linux 6.2 is Call Depth Tracking and it can help extend the useful service life of Intel Skylake through Coffeelake era processors in providing better performance than is otherwise found out-of-the-box on Linux.

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development...

While JPEG-XL image support has been available opt-in within Firefox Nightly builds for testing, Mozilla has finally weighed in on the JPEG-XL debate and has come out "neutral" on the matter for this modern raster image file format...

A new patch series published this week by AMD engineers is preparing Linux kernel support for Secure TSC, a feature found with SEV-SNP enabled processors since the EPYC 7003 "Milan" series...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that was started originally as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics continues flourishing. A number of MSM driver additions -- including new Qualcomm platform support -- is ready to go with the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel...

AMDVLK 2023.Q1.1 is out today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver for 2023. Given the month and a half since the prior update, this AMDVLK update is rather significant with all of its changes...

As a new hardware feature for Intel IoT and server platforms not previously announced at large, Intel Timed I/O is being worked on in a new open-source Linux kernel driver...

A set of 24 Linux kernel patches today wire up the basic ACPI infrastructure support for the RISC-V processor architecture...

The Khronos Group with LunarG has now published the Vulkan SDK 1.3.239 release that is the first version of the software development kit with the Vulkan Video extensions now present...

With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.

Code merged last week to Mesa 23.1 by AMD ensures that a linear copy buffer is made on the display/scanout GPU when dealing with EGL contexts under Wayland or X11. This follows an optimization made last year to Mesa's GLX code within X.Org environments for enhancing the PRIME/multi-GPU support...

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging Linux 6.2-rc6 is a late "fix" for the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) code to avoid possible situations of undefined behavior with difficult to debug issues where a modern Linux host with SEV-SNP may try booting a Linux virtual machine with an outdated kernel...