Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux.
After what has felt like years of neglect and little progress in advancing this open-source mail/communications client, Thunderbird 102 is out today with some shiny new features and a lot of UI refinements.
AMD's GPUOpen team quietly setup a new GitHub repository for "gpurt", presumably a new ray-tracing related software effort.
Arm today announced their second-generation Armv9 CPU designs with the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715. Arm also refreshed the Cortex-A510 to allow for more cores and a power reduction.
Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance.
In addition to announcing the GeForce GTX 1630 budget card today (expect our Linux review soon), NVIDIA published 515.57 as their newest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a fresh batch of features for the next Fedora Linux distribution release.
With last week seeing AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 released as an update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver and it noting performance improvements, it was time for some fresh benchmarks of that driver up against Mesa's alternative "RADV" Vulkan driver. Here are some fresh benchmarks with an AMD RDNA2 GPU for seeing how RADV continues competing -- and usually outperforming -- AMD's own official open-source driver.
For those not yet on the GCC 11 or GCC 12 stable series, GCC 10.4 is out today as the latest in that older stable series.
A "sched/fair" scheduler change queued this morning into TIP's sched/core for Linux 5.20 aims to enhance the efficiency when searching for an idle CPU under heavy system load. The change led by Intel should improve the kernel's efficiency when the system is overloaded but as with most low-level tuning does run the risk of regressions.
A decade after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver effort for reverse-engineering Arm Mali graphics, developers continue occasionally working on improvements to this Gallium3D driver for older generations of Mali hardware. The most recent feature work is finally enabling 4x MSAA support.
Last month for their Vision conference, Intel announced the Habana Labs Gaudi2 accelerator. Gaudi2 is the second-generation offering from Intel-owned Habana Labs for training and inference. The open-source Linux kernel driver support for Gaudi2 is now getting underway along with accompanying open-source user-space software stack support.
Git 2.37 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, distributed revision control system.
The Rust-GCC front-end that allows Rust code to be compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) could possibly be upstreamed for next year's GCC 13 compiler release but not necessarily complete at that stage. In any case, it's good seeing progress on Rust-GCC as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler.
Merged today to Mesa 22.2 was a four month old merge request for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" that significantly improves the 16-bit FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) performance.
Coming about last week was a Fedora 37 change proposal to improve the profiling and debugging of Fedora packages but with possible performance costs. That suggested change is about adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when building packages so the frame pointer is always available for improving the debugging/profiling of the stock Fedora packages. Unfortunately, it can come with significant performance costs as these benchmarks show.
One of Intel's many wonderful open-source projects for creators is OSPRay Studio that is their interactive visualization and ray-tracing application built atop their OSPRay portable ray-tracing engine. OSPRay Studio has been making steady progress since its 2020 debut and out today is their newest update.
The Firefox 102.0 release is now available for download ahead of its stable release announcement tomorrow.
Google engineers are working on the notion of "memory modes" for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the intent on introducing a "low memory" mode for storage devices that would alter its behavior. Presumably Google is working on this new F2FS feature for low-end Android devices.
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc4 as the newest weekly test candidate. There are more patches this week than in the prior Linux 5.19-rc versions but nothing too scary as well as having some notable patches in tow.
Jens Axboe, Linux storage expert and IO_uring lead developer, released liburing 2.2 this weekend as the newest version of this helper library that makes it easier for user-space software to make use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring support.
NVIDIA has contributed support to the FFmpeg multimedia library for being able to take advantage of AV1 GPU-accelerated video decoding by way of the VDPAU API when using the latest-generation NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs.
Last month Microsoft issued the first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution used for powering services from Microsoft Azure to WSL use-cases and more. CBL-Mariner 2.0 this weekend saw a rather large monthly update with a number of fixes, package updates, and new additions to this "Common Base Linux" platform.
Shotcut remains one of the leading open-source, cross-platform video editors built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework with FFmpeg. Out this week is Shotcut 22.06 as the newest feature update to this non-linear video editing solution.
For the Fedora 37 cycle Fedora CoreOS is hoping to be promoted to an official release "edition" alongside the likes of Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server.
2022 is certainly looking to be interesting on the open-source graphics driver front... You probably didn't have Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver on your 2022 bingo card nor NVIDIA working on an open-source GPU kernel driver. The latest 2022 surprise is the OpenChrome driver project is hoping to finally be mainlined in Linux 5.20 for open-source VIA graphics for those still running vintage VIA x86 hardware.
LLVM developers are eyeing Zstandard "Zstd" use within this compiler stack as a secondary compression method to Zlib. Zstd could be used for compressing ELF debug sections, AST data structures, and other purposes within this open-source compiler stack.
While Arch Linux itself is quite easy to get setup these days thanks to Archinstall for a quick installation process and sane defaults, for those looking for a nice and polished experience EndeavourOS remains one of the nice Arch-based desktop Linux distributions.
KDE released Plasma 5.25.1 this week with the first batch of bug fixes to the Plasma 5.25 desktop while yet more fixes are coming down the pipe to Plasma and other KDE software components.
This shouldn't be too surprising considering some of Linus Torvalds past commentary about compiler optimizations and bad experiences long ago with GCC, but Linus Torvalds is not interested in seeing a tunable Kconfig option for using the -O3 compiler optimization level for building the Linux kernel without substantial justification.
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing the open-source driver stack for Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist hardware. While much of the base enablement work is complete and now with Linux 5.19 the compute support is even exposed to user-space, one of the areas seeing more work in recent times has been around power management.
One of the great defaults when installing Pop!_OS or receiving a pre-loaded laptop/desktop from System76 or the new HP Dev One is that it encourages full-disk encryption and prominently shown during the install process. I highly recommend full-disk encryption especially for laptops. As it's been a few years since running benchmarks looking at the overhead of LUKS encryption, here are some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 22.04 on the HP Dev One with the full disk encryption enabled and then a fresh install without encryption.
While many Red Hat open-source projects end up being relatively instant successes that then end up being widely adopted in the open-source community, Red Hat's Stratis Storage effort seems to be trending as one of the exceptions. Red Hat continues investing in Stratis but it doesn't seem to have the sizable adoption or widespread interest that tends to come with most of their projects. In any event, Fedora 37 later this year should ship with the newest Stratis tech.
Google's Stadia cloud gaming service since its 2019 launch has relied upon custom Vega-based GPUs in their Linux servers but now it looks like they may be quietly transitioning to using NVIDIA GPUs.
Following this week's Chrome 103 release, Google has now promoted Chrome 104 to beta.
With the recent release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it is shipping systemd-oomd by default on their desktop for trying to better handle low-memory / out-of-memory situations. However, in real-world use systemd-oomd is too easily killing user-space applications like Firefox and Chrome when approaching memory pressure. This is a poor Ubuntu 22.04 user experience but the developers now have an idea for their approach to addressing this solution.
Fedora developers are weighing adding an option to the default compilation flags for Fedora 37 that can enhance the performance profiling and debug-ability of generated packages but possible performance overhead implications -- possibly a few percent based on prior figures.
A set of patches have been posted for making the "-O3" compiler optimization level more easily accessible when building the Linux kernel but still it's not recommended and some kernel developers do not even want to see it as a Kconfig option.
This week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request was sent out of new DRM changes ready for queuing ahead of Linux 5.20. There isn't too much to get excited about for this week's code updates going to DRM-Next, but there is "fbcon: Improve scrolling performance" that did get my attention.
From 2011 to 2017 while Ubuntu had been using the LightDM display manager developed by Canonical, their engineers were actively supporting it and making new releases to coincide with new Ubuntu Linux updates. But with Ubuntu now using GDM as its default desktop display manager, there hasn't been a new LightDM release in three years and not much in the way of upstream activity. Today Canonical's lead LightDM maintainer issued a status update for the project.
The first beta of Krita 5.1 for this leading open-source digital painting program is now available for testing.