Svobodný software

Published back in November were a set of patches for allowing (e)BPF to extend the Linux kernel's scheduler. That interesting work is continuing with Friday having brought a second revision to the patches...

Along with Intel's DRM-Next material shifting to more bug fixing, AMD's AMDGPU/AMDKFD Direct Rendering Manager driver changes this week have shifted over to delivering more graphics driver fixes...

With LibreOffice 7.5 due out next week and that code already having been branched, in the LibreOffice mainline code this week they have dropped support for some old targets...

With Plasma 5.27 set to be the last Plasma 5 feature release in the series, KDE developers have been very busy trying to ensure that this desktop update will ship with minimal issues. There's been a ton of bug fixing to land this past week for Plasma 5.27, especially when it comes to the Plasma Wayland support...

Following the LLVM 16.0 feature freeze and code branching earlier this week, LLVM 16.0.0-rc1 is now available as the first of at least three planned release candidates...

Another batch of Intel i915 DRM kernel graphics driver updates were sent out Friday to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window opening next month...

Most of the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver development has been done by the likes of Valve, Google, and Red Hat engineers with it being an "unofficial" driver while AMD supports AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver as well as supporting their closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver too that shares common code with their Windows Vulkan driver. It was pleasant to see AMD this week though submitting new feature code to RADV...

Last summer Intel published guidance around the Data Operand Independent Timing (DOIT) instruction mode that can be enabled with recent generations of Intel processors to ensure constant time execution for a subset of the Intel instruction set, which can be particularly important for cryptographic algorithms. Linux kernel developer discussions fizzled out last year over handling this DOIT functionality for what is described as a CPU vulnerability with recent Intel CPUs. However, now a Linux kernel patch from a Google developer would enable this change unconditionally for newer Intel CPUs but raises performance concerns.

TornadoVM is an open-source plugin for OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows for running Java programs on heterogeneous hardware like GPUs and FPGAs. With today's TornadoVM 0.15, it's the first release now supporting discrete Intel Arc Graphics hardware...

Earlier this month Intel announced they would be discontinuing development of HAXM as a hardware-accelerated execution manager that's been popular on Windows and macOS for Android emulation. While the original announcement discontinued its development immediately, they decided to go ahead and put out one final version: Intel HAXM 7.8 is available today for concluding this open-source project...

Microsoft engineers seem to be working on getting the Dozen "dzn" Mesa driver up to speed as quickly as possible. It was just earlier this month it began passing nearly all Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests, Vulkan 1.1 was then exposed just a few days ago, and now Dzn is ironing out Vulkan 1.2...

For those making use of Intel's sub-NUMA cluster (SNC) configuration option available on their servers since Skylake, the Linux resource control "resctrl" kernel code is being improved upon to better handle this resource configuration...

The Intel "habanalabs" AI driver is moving to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem with the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel cycle...

Kostya Shishkov se teď v lednu rozpovídal o historií FFmpegu. Je to místy čtení zajímavé a sluší se připomenout si, jak to bylo, je, bude s jedním z významných open-source projektů audio/video světa.

While Mesa 23.0 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 22.3.4 was released today as the newest bi-weekly stable bug-fix release for the open-source Mesa 3D drivers...

Intel open-source engineers continue to be quite busy in bringing up the Linux support for Emerald Rapids as the successor to Sapphire Rapids and then as well for Granite Rapids as the Xeon Scalable processors following that. With the i10nm EDAC changes queued up ahead of Linux 6.3, there is support through Granite Rapids as well as confirming Granite Rapids supporting up to 12 channel DDR5 system memory...

Canonical announced this morning that their Ubuntu Pro subscription service has been promoted from beta to general availability (GA)...

With many Phoronix readers having been excited by the recent helloSystem v0.8 release as a FreeBSD-powered OS taking major design inspiration from Apple's macOS, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how this FreeBSD 13.1 based operating system was competing with a few different Linux distributions from an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (Zen 4) desktop.

Following the month-long Christmas break, the Vulkan API working group is back to carrying out weekly(-ish) updates to the Vulkan specification. Out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.240 that brings one new extension in addition to a number of clarifications and corrections to the document...

Now that Wine 8.0 shipped earlier this week, the Wine Git tree is back to accepting new feature patches after it was under a feature freeze since early December. With nearly two months worth of feature work to land, it's been a busy week landing new code for what in turn will be found in the Wine 8.1 bi-weekly development release...