Being sent in as a fix for the Linux 5.15 kernel this morning and to be back-ported to existing stable series is a behavior change that the Linux kernel will no longer use AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) by default on supported hardware but rather making it now opt-in due to shortcomings of some platforms.
The Vortex86 32-bit SoCs have worked under Linux for those distributions still maintaining 32-bit x86 support and where not hitting corner-cases of some i686 level features not being supported by some Vortex86 cores, but there is finally a pending kernel patch to provide proper CPU detection for Vortex86 hardware.
It was just last week that Linux optimizations were leading to possible 6M IOPS per core and then at the start of this week new patches pushed Linux past 7M IOPS per-core with an ideal hardware configuration as well. In ending out the week, 8M IOPS has been reached!
Cloud-Hypervisor 19.0 debuted this week as the Intel-led open-source VMM focused on supporting modern cloud workloads and written in the Rust programming language while leveraging the Linux's KVM virtualization code or the Microsoft MSHV hypervisor on Windows.
Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver.
This week marked the release of Plasma 5.23 in celebrating 25 years of the KDE desktop project while celebrations didn't last long with developers already hard at work on the Plasma 5.23.1 point release, feature work for Plasma 5.24, and also improvements to the KDE Applications and KDE Frameworks.
The open-source Bareflank Hypervisor project designed to prototype new hypervisors across Intel, AMD, and AArch64 platforms issued their long-awaited 3.0 pre-release on Friday.
On Thursday in addition to the releases of Ubuntu 21.10 (plus its derivatives) and OpenBSD 7.0, the Genode OS Framework based Sculpt OS saw its 21.10 release.
The Khronos Group's OpenCL working group did a quiet Friday evening tagging of OpenCL 3.0.9.
The PinePhone Pro is being announced this morning as the organization's new smartphone building upon the successes and experience of the original PinePhone Linux smartphone.
Intel's open-source engineers have shipped Compute-Runtime 21.41.21220 as the newest version of this Linux compute stack enabling OpenCL and Level Zero support with their graphics processors.
Libaom 3.2 is now available as the latest version of the official AOMedia/Google-developed AV1 Codec Library. With libaom 3.2 comes compression efficiency improvements, perceptual quality improvements, and a variety of speed-ups and memory optimizations.
Cluster scheduler support has been queued up for landing in the Linux 5.16 kernel for AArch64 and x86_64 systems for improving the CPU scheduler behavior for systems that have clusters of CPU cores.
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week.
With it getting late into the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle, the focus is shifting by the Direct Rendering Driver maintainers from new feature work targeting the next cycle (5.16) to instead on bug fixes. AMD sent out a pull request of new AMDGPU Linux 5.16 material this week that is primarily delivering bug fixes but one notable addition is finally enabling PSR by default for newer GPUs.
Made public this week by CPU security researchers at Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security was the research paper published "AMD Prefetch Attacks through Power and Time". The paper points to AMD CPUs suffering from a side-channel leakage vulnerability through timing and power variations of the PREFETCH instruction. The paper argues that AMD CPUs should activate stronger page table isolation by default. AMD has now published their security response where they are not recommending any mitigation changes at this time. But what if Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI/PTI) proves necessary for AMD CPUs? Here are some initial benchmarks showing what that performance impact could look like.
X.Org Server 21.1 continues running slightly behind schedule but out today is a second release candidate of that upcoming xorg-server version -- the first in more than three years.
Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" is officially out today as the latest stable release of this Linux distribution known for being a close rebuild of Debian but without a dependence on systemd.
Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" is now officially available as the latest six-month update to Ubuntu Linux and also serving as the last release prior to the next long-term support cycle, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
NVIDIA 495.29.05 is out today as the first public Linux driver in the 495 series.
Not only is Ubuntu 21.10 releasing today but over on the BSD side of the table is the debut this morning of OpenBSD 7.0.
While we recently looked at autumn 2021 Linux distributions on Intel Tiger Lake for seeing how these various latest distributions are competing on client platforms, in today's article is a look at how well the latest Linux distributions perform when using the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" server hardware with two Xeon Platinum 8380 processors. AlmaLinux, Arch Linux, CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu were battling it out on this Intel reference server.
KDE Plasma 5.23 is officially out this morning as the newest major open-source desktop release and is known now as the KDE 25th Anniversary Edition.
With Qt 6.2 LTS having shipped at the end of September, The Qt Company is now turning their attention to Qt Creator 6 as the next version of their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment.
Moving forward regular respins of the openSUSE Leap images are expected to include the latest package updates in making for a more pleasant out-of-the-box experience.
A new feature for upcoming XeHPG graphics that was merged into Intel's open-source Linux OpenGL and Vulkan drivers today was for tessellation distribution and geometry distribution across the graphics hardware.
Mesa 21.3 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate issued.
The Linux kernel has supported Retpolines for over three years now as part of their Spectre Variant Two mitigations while now a patch series is proposed that rewrites Retpoline's rewrite logic.
Released back in May was the shiny DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release while today a point release for it has been issued.
Today AMD is officially launching the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card as a trimmed down model from the Radeon RX 6600 XT that launched back in August. This new (non-XT) model has a suggested price of $329 USD and here is a look at how well this RDNA2 graphics card is performing under Linux.
Arriving back in April were the initial Vulkan Video extensions that included support for video decode of H.264 and H.265 while the initial video encode support was limited to H.264. Out today with Vulkan 1.2.196 is the new extension allowing for H.265 encoding with this new industry-standard video API.
Landing in time for the imminent Mesa 21.3 feature freeze / code branching is support for the EGL_EXT_present_opaque extension on Wayland. While this EGL extension may not sound too exciting, for some OpenGL games on Wayland it will address some transparency issues.
Chinese vendor Loongson continues working on their Linux kernel patches enabling the LoongArch processor ISA as their fork from MIPS. While early on when copying existing MIPS open-source code they were quick to call their new ISA "not MIPS", in these later patch series they continue to refer to their ISA as "a bit like MIPS or RISC-V."
One of many exciting additions with the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel is DAMON landed as a data access monitoring framework. DAMON opens up new possibilities around proactive reclamation of system memory and other interesting features. Currently though it's limited to monitoring the virtual address space of the kernel but a new set of patches out allow for physical address space monitoring as well.