Among many Intel driver improvements in Linux 5.19, Intel's new "In-Field Scan" (IFS) driver has now premiered in the mainline kernel for testing future processors against any silicon issues prior to deployment or as the processors age.

What started out as hopes of enabling RADV ray-tracing by default has led to initially ray queries being enabled by default.

Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) as security-related extensions to their processors that allow for protected memory enclaves has had a rather bouncy journey. Intel continues supporting SGX on their latest Xeon processors but on the client side have been deprecated since 11th Gen Core. Over the years SGX has been found vulnerable to various attacks from speculative execution exploits to Plundervolt. It also turns out under Linux until now was also open to crashing under memory pressure.

The Linux kernel's printk() function for printing messages to the kernel log continues to be improved upon in 2022.

Back in 2020 Intel engineers working on the Linux kernel added split lock detection to provide a warning when an atomic operation spans multiple cache lines and requires a global bus lock for atomicity. A warning is now deemed not useful enough so instead the intent moving forward is to "make life miserable" for such misbehaving user-space applications by slowing down the performance with hopes of the app developers better handling their code.

If release trends hold, we should be roughly half-way through the PHP 8.2 development cycle with the annual feature releases normally out toward the end of November. Given that, this weekend I decided to try out the state of PHP 8.2 Git and carry out some early benchmarks to get an idea where things are headed.

The Motorola 68000, Xtensa, and C-SKY processor architectures all saw notable additions for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel.

The Linux 5.19 kernel is adding a new make x86_debug.config build target as a set of defaults in enabling a variety of recommended debugging features for x86/x86_64 kernel builds.

Sent in this morning for Linux 5.19 is AMD SEV-SNP support for that hardware feature introduced last year with AMD EPYC Milan 7003 series processors. Meanwhile Intel's alternative technology, Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) is coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" and also with Linux 5.19 that functionality is being readied on the software side.

It was just last October that Mesa's V3DV driver achieved Vulkan 1.1 conformance for this Broadcom Vulkan open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Now Vulkan 1.2 is just on the horizon.

Last year with the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors one of the new security features was SEV-SNP, or the "Secure Nested Paging" update to the Secure Encrypted Virtualization functionality that has built up with succeeding EPYC generations. While AMD published out-of-tree kernel patches in a GitHub repository to enable SEV-SNP and has been volleying several revisions to them on the kernel mailing list, one year later it's finally arriving in mainline with the Linux 5.19 kernel.

While not marked as a pull request yet for mainlining to the kernel, Miguel Ojeda this morning sent out an updated set of patches adding in the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel. Separately, a new version of Uutils was released this weekend as the Rust language implementation of GNU Coreutils.

Adding to the many changes expected for Linux 5.19, block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring creator Jens Axboe has submitted his several pull requests for this now-open new kernel development cycle.

AMD CEO Lisa Su keynoted this morning for Computex 2022 where she talked up some of the company's processor plans for the rest of the year. The focal points were on the much anticipated Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors as well as announcing the "Mendocino" APUs that will be coming to affordable laptops later in the year.

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.18 kernel, the GNU FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-Libre 5.18-gnu kernel as their downstream that strips out support for using proprietary microcode/firmware or the ability to load binary-only kernel modules.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18 on-time as the newest stable kernel release.

Unless Linus Torvalds has reservations today about the changes to land in the kernel this past week and decides to issue an extra RC, Linux 5.18 is expected to be christened as stable today and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.19 merge window. Based on the "-next" activity, here is a look at the many changes expected to be merged for Linux 5.19.

As I've written about since last year the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working on experimental mesh shader support and more recently in Mesa Git code around task shaders for RADV have been landing. Timur Kristóf who is contracted by Valve to work on the open-source Linux graphics stack has been working on the mesh/task shader support in preparation for an upcoming cross-vendor Vulkan extension around mesh shading.

With NVIDIA's recent R515 Linux driver beta that ushered in their new open-source GPU kernel driver in development, NVIDIA posted a list of their known Wayland implementation issues/shortcomings affecting users.

The PostgreSQL 15 database server will be releasing in a few months and is yet another major release to this open-source relational database system when it comes to performance.

Back in 2019 Chinese CPU company Zhaoxin introduced "LuJiaZui" as their 16nm x86 CPU design for use from laptops up through servers. LuJiaZui is much improved from their earlier chips though still well behind AMD and Intel performance. Proper GCC compiler support for LuJiaZui was sent out again this week after their previous upstreaming attempt hadn't made it into GCC 12 due to being late in the cycle.

With Linux 5.18 expected to be released as stable tomorrow and that opening up the Linux 5.19 merge window, feature work aimed for this next kernel should be largely wrapped up. Within the RISC-V architecture's "for-next" branch is several interesting additions.

Systemd 251 is officially out this Saturday as the first feature update to this Linux init system for 2022.

An early change made this week to Ubuntu 22.10 in its early development state is replacing the PulseAudio sound server with PipeWire.

The folks from the Polish open-source firmware consulting firmware 3mdeb are hosting another "OSF vPub" where they discuss open-source firmware efforts over beers in this currently-virtual event.

HarfBuzz 4.3 was released on Friday as this open-source library that serves as a text shaping engine used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Flutter, Java, all major web browsers, and other software.

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.25 beta release, KDE developers turned their attention to bug fixing and they accomplished a lot.

Wine 7.9 was released on Friday as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

To date Pop!_OS has been System76's own Ubuntu derivative pre-loaded onto their various laptops and desktops. Rather interestingly, HP is preparing to launch a new laptop that will make use of Pop!_OS.

It's been a fairly smooth week and Linus Torvalds is expected this Sunday to formally release the Linux 5.18 stable kernel. Unless he has any last minute reservations and decides to stretch it out an extra week, Linux 5.18 will be out as stable and with it comes a great deal of new features -- especially for benefiting AMD and Intel products from CPUs to GPUs.

While Mesa's RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues seeing a lot of activity on a near daily basis by developers from Valve, Red Hat, Google, and other independent contributors, AMD continues with AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their internal, closed-source Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux. Out today is AMDVLK 2022.Q2.2 as the latest open-source snapshot of this Vulkan driver.

Fedora will keep around its legacy BIOS support that was decided earlier this month after a proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support to focus resources on UEFI-only booting. However, Fedora will be relying more on the community to maintain that legacy boot support and as such the Fedora BIOS Boot SIG (Special Interest Group) is now established.

Since Ubuntu 20.10 there has been Active Directory integration in the Ubiquity installer while now it looks like the latest effort by Canonical on enhancing the Ubuntu desktop for the enterprise is around Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration.

While the kernel-side Intel AMX support landed in Linux 5.16 and KVM support for AMX in Linux 5.17, other Linux patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) remain floating around. One important patch-set was updated this week for ensuring proper power management on AMX-enabled processors, coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" this year.

Merged yesterday to the mainline X.Org Server for XWayland is the "-force-xrandr-emulation" option added for Valve's Gamescope / Steam Deck usage.

AMD has released a new version of AOMP, its LLVM/Clang compiler downstream where they stage their latest patches focused on OpenMP GPU offload support for their Radeon graphics cards / Instinct accelerators.

While the hostname on Linux systems is widely relied upon for different applications, setting the hostname is usually left up to user-space by the init system at boot. However, should any user-space processes try to read the system hostname prior to it being set, it could lead to unintended results. So now finally in 2022 there is a kernel parameter working its way upstream with "hostname=" should you want to ensure the hostname is set before user-space is started.

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release.

Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production.

The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available.

Intel today has lifted the embargo on SYCLomatic, their new open-source tool to help migrate code-bases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA so they can be re-purposed to target C++ and SYCL -- thereby being able to leverage Intel's graphics processors and jiving with their oneAPI goals.

The KDE development community today announced the release of the Plasma 5.25 beta.

Last week I wrote about how well known Mesa developer Samuel Pitoiset who is employed by Valve already started working on GFX11 (RDNA3) support for RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa that isn't officially supported by AMD but remains more popular than their own "AMDVLK" driver. More GFX11/RDNA3 preparation work remains ongoing and it's looking like if trends continue this open-source driver could be ready for RDNA3 graphics cards in time for launch.

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support.

Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) remains a very promising effort for enhancing Linux system performance and particularly about providing a superior experience when the Linux kernel is dealing with system memory pressure. MGLRU v11 was posted this week while we await to see if it will be mainlined come the v5.19 merge window.

Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel.