While PipeWire continues gaining traction for fulfilling the audio management roles long handled by PulseAudio, the PulseAudio project itself continues progressing and successfully evolving its mature code-base. Out this weekend is PulseAudio 16.0.
Following this week's release of Chrome 102, Google has promoted Chrome 103 to beta for their cross-platform web browser.
Andrew Morton with his recent shift to a Git-based workflow rather than maintaining long patch series has sent in all of the memory management "mm" changes for the Linux 5.19 merge window.
While for years Intel has traditionally devoted all their video acceleration attention on Linux to VA-API (and the Media SDK albeit less popular with Linux enthusiasts), with the modern oneAPI world for Intel hardware their oneVPL library is quickly becoming a viable contender and a primary focus for their open-source video accelerator efforts. On Friday the oneVPL 2022.1 release was made available.
Finally for FAT file-systems with the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel is support via the statx() system call for reporting a file's birth/creation time.
Ahead of next month's big Plasma 5.25 release, KDE developers are wrapping up May with more bug fixes for polishing up this open-source desktop.
Intel has been working heavily on getting the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem in place so that when next-generation servers appear with this new high-speed interconnect industry standard, open-source operating systems will be ready.
Lavapipe as Mesa's software/CPU-based Vulkan implementation akin to LLVMpipe for OpenGL is now officially Vulkan 1.2 conformant.
The HID subsystem changes were merged this week into the Linux 5.19 kernel.
It looks like AMD is preparing for another low-end/entry-level Radeon RDNA2 graphics card, given their latest open-source Linux graphics driver code.
Mario Limonciello just released a new version of fwupd, the open-source firmware updating utility that integrates with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making it easy to update system firmware/BIOS on Linux as well as firmware for various peripheral devices.
The various ARM SoC and machine/platform updates have landed in the Linux 5.19 kernel with a number of notable additions.
The sound subsystem updates for the Linux 5.19 kernel include the initial Intel "AVS" sound driver code.
Two years after the merge request was originally opened, the upcoming Wayland 1.21 release is adding high resolution scroll wheel support for mice to match the work carried out for X.Org and within the Linux kernel drivers.
For those still on the GNU Compiler Collection 9 series for that compiler introduced in 2019, GCC 9.5 was released today as the last planned point release to that compiler.
The media subsystem updates have landed this week for the ongoing Linux 5.19 merge window for this collection of video encode/decode drivers.
Valve this evening published SteamOS 3.2 as the newest version of their Arch Linux based operating system for the Steam Deck and currently running unofficially by passionate Linux gamers on other hardware too.
Earlier this week AWS announced general availability on their new Arm Neoverse-V1 based processors, Graviton3. Right after that I posted some initial Graviton3 benchmarks against prior-generation Graviton2 for showing the very sizable generational improvement with Amazon's new in-house Arm server processors. Since then I have been carrying out a more robust set of around 100 benchmarks across the original Graviton instance, Graviton2, Graviton3, and then up again Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC competing instances. Here is that much larger collection of Graviton3 performance benchmarks carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
The Renesas (originally Hitachi Semiconductor) H8/300 "h8300" CPU architecture support is set to be removed again once more from the Linux kernel. It was previously retired years ago before being restored only to once again fail to be maintained.
Last year Ampere Computing announced they were designing their own in-house AArch64 server/cloud processor cores to succeed their current Ampere Altra / Ampere Altra Max processors leveraging Arm Neoverse N1 cores. The company announced today that their first in-house cloud native processor core designs will be marketed under the AmpereOne branding.
AlmaLinux has been one of the distributions born out of CentOS Linux (non-Stream) going end-of-life and has made a name for itself already in the industry with companies like AMD backing it for those looking at a no-cost/community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just one week after RHEL 9.0 went GA, AlmaLinux 9.0 is being officially released today.
It was just last month that AMD announced plans to acquire Pensando and today that $1.9 billion deal has been completed.
Following recent rumors of Broadcom pursuing a VMware acquisition, Broadcom announced today their intent to acquire the virtualization company for $61 billion (USD).
In addition to the many HPC workloads and other scientific computing tasks where Intel's AVX-512 performance on their latest processor proves very beneficial, it also turns out AVX-512 can provide significant benefit to a much more mundane web server task: JSON parsing. The simdjson project that is focused on "parsing gigabytes of JSON per second" this week issued simdjson 2.0 and is headlined by an Intel-led contribution of AVX-512 support.
While from the outside it looks like DG2/Alchemist enablement under Linux is starting to settle down with Linux 5.19 beginning to expose compute support for these new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, beginning to add in production PCI IDs, and other refinements, the enablement battle isn't yet over.
Since last year CUPS development shifted to the OpenPrinting project with Apple no longer pursuing feature development on this long-time open-source Unix print server. That led to the release then of CUPS 2.4 and work on this open-source print server has revived. Out today is CUPS 2.4.2 with a few new features.
Both the KVM and Xen changes are ready to go with the other code piling on for the Linux 5.19 merge window.
In addition to the buttery Btrfs feature updates for the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel, the exFAT, EXT4, and EROFS file-system changes have all landed too so far in the first few days of the v5.19 merge window.
Cloud-Hypervisor as the open-source, Rust-based virtual machine monitor with a focus on security is out with its latest feature release. Cloud-Hypervisor started as one of many Intel open-source projects that last year shifted to under the Linux Foundation umbrella but still sees contributions from Intel as well as other industry leaders like Microsoft and Arm. Cloud-Hypervisor 24.0 is the newest version of this Rust VMM
The networking subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.19 kernel with big updates to core networking code as well as a lot of individual driver work this cycle both for wired and wireless networking.
The open-source, unofficial project providing a NVIDIA VA-API driver on Linux systems built atop the proprietary driver's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new feature release. This NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver effort continues to be driven in large part for allowing GPU-accelerated video acceleration in Firefox and other software only targeting the open Video Acceleration API.
Landing today in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code-base for Mesa 22.2 is support for the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension. The RadeonSI EGL_IMG_context_priority support was contributed by a KDE developer with the motivation of ensuring Wayland compositors can have high priority for rendering.
Way back in 2019 the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support given that it was superseded by ELF, which itself has already been supported for over two decades going back to Linux 1.x kernels. With Linux 5.19, the obsolete 32-bit x86 a.out support is finally being removed for good from the kernel.
The power management, ACPI, and thermal control updates are ready for Linux 5.19. This cycle there is a lot of PM/thermal work as usual on the Arm side while Intel also continues with a lot of changes from new hardware support to improving overheat handling of laptops for S0ix handling.
Bavarian PC vendor TUXEDO Computers that specializes in various Linux pre-loaded notebooks and desktop computers recently launched their Aura 15 Gen2 laptop focused on being an "affordable business allrounder" and powered by AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors with integrated Vega graphics to make for a nice open-source driver experience. TUXEDO sent over the Aura 15 Gen2 for a round of testing and here's a look at this Ubuntu Linux laptop's performance and capabilities.
It was over a year ago that AMD initially added the "GFX90A" target to their LLVM AMDGPU compiler back-end while now this week added to the GNU Compiler Collection for the GCC 13 release not due out until next year is its GFX90A support for the GNU toolchain.
David Airlie this morning sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates for the Linux 5.19 merge window. Most notable with the DRM display/graphics driver updates for this next kernel version is a lot of work on Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist in getting that support ready plus initial Raptor Lake enablement. as well as AMD preparing for next-generation CDNA Instinct products and RDNA3 Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards.
It's been five years already since Red Hat started Stratis as a configuration daemon built atop LVM and XFS in aiming to provide advanced storage functionality in user-space akin to what is offered by the advanced Btrfs and ZFS file-systems.
The 64-bit Arm (AArch64) architecture changes have been merged into the in-development Linux 5.19 kernel.
Security researcher Jason Donenfeld known as the founder of the WireGuard project has recently been focused on modernizing the Linux kernel's random number generator (RNG/random) code. With the Linux 5.19 kernel there is yet more work landing.
David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
Google just promoted Chrome 102 to stable as the latest feature update to their cross-platform web browser.
The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel has long honored the "clearcpuid=" kernel parameter to disable select CPUID features from being used by the kernel or readily advertised. However, it hasn't been very intuitive to use since it relied on passing the bit numbers for the specific features. With Linux 5.19 it's much easier to deal with in now allowing the CPUID string from /proc/cpuinfo to be passed if wanting particular CPUID features disabled.
Vulkan 1.3.215 is out today with a handful of fixes/clarifications to the Vulkan specification plus one new extension.
Nginx as the lightweight web-server known for its speedy performance is out today with the version 1.22 feature release.
At the end of last year Amazon announced their new Graviton3 processors with around 25% more compute performance than their prior Graviton2 AArch64 processors, up to 2x the FP and crypto performance, DDR5 system memory support, and other improvements to their in-house processor for the AWS cloud. Yesterday the C7g instances reached general availability for making Graviton3 processors available to AWS customers. Here are some initial benchmarks.
In recent kernel versions there has been an uptick in new driver activity around improving hardware sensor monitoring support for AMD/Intel desktop motherboards, but still it's generally behind that of the support found under Microsoft Windows. With Linux 5.19 there is more hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem work with improving sensor coverage on various motherboards and other components.
Mir 2.8 is now available as the newest feature update to this Wayland compositor developed by Canonical for various Ubuntu use-cases, primarily around IoT, digital signage, and similar fields.
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.