Following Amazon's DAMON being merged in Linux 5.15 as a data monitoring access framework, being merged for Linux 5.16 is an addition building on top of that for memory reclamation when experiencing system RAM pressure.
Announced back in May was the Cortex-A710 as the first-generation Armv9 "big" core and successor to the Cortex-A78. The initial Cortex-A710 support is now present in the GCC 12 code compiler.
PipeWire 0.3.40 is out today with various bug fixes but also a number of improvements.
Prominent Btrfs file-system developer Josef Bacik is working through a big set of patches that will result in on-disk format changes to Btrfs but address some of "the more painful parts" to the file-system's design.
OEMs have begun releasing updated BIOS/firmware revisions to address new security vulnerabilities disclosed this week by Intel. Most pressing are potential security vulnerabilities within the BIOS reference code used by various Intel CPUs that could lead to privilege escalation by local users and ranked a "high" impact severity.
As part of Google's effort around fuzzing for improving open-source security, the company today announced ClusterFuzzLite as their new, easy-to-use solution for fuzzing open and closed-source projects with ease as part of the CI/CD process.
Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Wednesday for the nearly over Linux 5.16 merge window.
Last week saw the main set of ACPI and power management changes for Linux 5.16 while merged on Wednesday were a secondary set of updates. Notable on the ACPI side are some changes in preparing for allowing Linux drivers to "probe" hardware while being powered off.
The Mesa 21.3 development cycle continues dragging on due to blocker bugs affecting the Intel code, so instead it's another week with a new release candidate.
Coreboot 4.15 was tagged today as the latest advertised version of this open-source firmware implementation for systems. With this new version are 21 additional laptops and motherboards supported.
While many Linux users were excited years ago around EOMA68 and in part the possibility of an open, upgradeable laptop design, it has yet to ship and looking like it never will -- not to mention being very outdated specifications by today's standards. Entirely unrelated to that prior upgradeable hardware effort but continuing in similar goals is The Framework Laptop. The Framework Laptop is a thin, upgradeable notebook that is Linux-friendly and allows the user to easily upgrade their own components. I was testing The Framework Laptop for a while and from the hardware perspective is a very nice device and running well under Linux.
Over the past nearly two decades Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been known as an initiative for getting students involved with open-source software development over the course of a summer while receiving a stipend/grant from Google. Beginning next year, GSoC will no longer be limited to students but open to all adults. Additionally, other changes are also coming.
Valve just sent out an email to pre-order customers that the Steam Deck release is being delayed by two months.
While since the end of October there has been NVIDIA 495.44 as the stable 495 series driver beta for Linux users, out today is their v470.86 release for those using that older long-term support branch.
The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit wrapped up yesterday with interesting talks on this open-source, cross-platform ZFS file-system implementation.
For fans of Jolla's Linux-based smartphone platform, Sailfish OS 4.3 "Suomenlinna" is out today.
Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface.
Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022.
Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas.
While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster.
Merged last week into the Linux 5.16 kernel is improved Retpoline "return trampoline" code.
HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed.
Recently I ran benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 21.10 performance has improved for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" even compared to just six months ago with Ubuntu 21.04. In this article is a broader look at AMD EPYC Milan on the autumn 2021 Linux distributions with firing up not only Ubuntu 21.10 but Fedora Server 35, Clear Linux 35150, CentOS Stream, and AlmaLinux 8.4 as other common alternatives in the Linux server space.
Xen para-virtualized guests booting on the Linux 5.16 kernel should see noticeably quicker boot times.
Intel's open-source Linux engineers continue to be quite busy bringing up CXL interconnect support within the mainline kernel. For the in-development Linux 5.16 is another batch of code landing.
As of this morning the GCC 12 compiler has landed support for -march=armv9-a for targeting the forthcoming Armv9-A ISA.
A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal.
Being worked on for more than a year by Intel and other kernel developers has been FGKASLR to enhance kernel security. While the Linux kernel has long supported Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make memory addresses less predictable, FGKASLR ups the security much more by placing that randomization at the function level. It's looking like FGKASLR could be mainlined soon.
NVIDIA used their GTC event today to announce OptiX 7.4 as the latest version of their ray-tracing engine/framework for use with their GPUs.
NVIDIA used their virtual GTC event to announce Jetson AGX Orin as the latest addition to their Jetson family. With Jetson AGX Orin they are advertising it as "the world's smallest, most powerful and energy-efficient AI supercomputer" for small form factor and low-power environments like robotics and edge computing applications.
The platform-drivers-x86 pull is exciting as usual for the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel.
AMD this morning hosted their Accelerated Data Center Premiere virtual event where they introduced Milan-X as well as the Instinct MI200. With Milan-X there is now 3D V-Cache introduced for the current generation and still-very-impressive EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors. I can personally attest to Milan-X being very exciting for HPC workloads and beyond with impressive gains to performance.
In addition to announcing Milan-X processors at the virtual Accelerated Data Center Premiere event, AMD just provided some new public details concerning next-generation Zen 4 processors.
Raspberry Pi OS as the official operating system for the Raspberry Pi single board computers has been updated against Debian 11 "Bullseye".
While just a point release, XWayland 21.1.3 that is out this morning is exciting in that it adds support for using NVIDIA's new proprietary driver that supports the GBM API for enhancing its Wayland support.
Last week the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) feature patches were sent out and subsequently merged for Linux 5.16.
It's been a while since last having any major progress to report on Etnaviv, the open-source Mesa Gallium3D driver supporting Vivante graphics IP. But a rather fundamental change was made this past week in that Etnaviv is now (finally) using NIR by default.
Linux 5.16 is an action-packed kernel with a ton of exciting additions and improvements. Adding to the growing list of changes to look forward to with v5.16 is mainline support for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
While it was initially communicated by Intel that Alder Lake's Golden Cove P-Cores has AVX-512 "fused off", that has turned out not to be the case at least with the initial batch of processors and current BIOS/firmware configurations. If disabling the power-efficient Gracemont E-Cores, it's possible to enable AVX-512 and make use of it. Here are some initial AVX-512 benchmarks in such a configuration under Linux with the Core i9 12900K.
Added to the Arch Linux ISOs earlier this year was Archinstall as an easy-to-use installer for Arch. In the months since its introduction the code continues to be improved upon and is preparing for its next feature release.
Released this week was Rav1e 0.5 as the newest feature release for this Rust-written AV1 video encoder backed by Xiph.Org and self-proclaimed to be the world's "fastest and safest" AV1 encoder.
The USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.16 kernel have arrived. This time around the changes are on the smaller side but there are two additions worth mentioning.
The "char/misc" changes have landed in Linux 5.16 as the catch-all area for code not fitting more appropriately within another subsystem or being a portion of the kernel that's too small for submitting pull requests directly to Linus Torvalds. For Linux 5.16, the IIO code has moved from being part of the staging area also maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman to now being under the char/misc umbrella. Additionally, another big item is the Intel Habana Labs driver updates.
System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment.