Canonical continues investing a lot in ensuring a first-rate Ubuntu experience when using Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2) with Windows 10 and newer. Rather than needing to wait longer to see the fruits of that work in the next Ubuntu releases, Canonical has now made "Ubuntu Preview" available from the Microsoft Store to have a daily-updated, bleeding-edge Ubuntu experience.
With the Linux 5.18 kernel reaching stable in the next week or two there is basic support for Tesla's FSD chip. That Samsung-based SoC for powering Tesla's full-self driving technology has the basic support pieces in place for this kernel while Samsung engineers are working on ironing out other portions of the SoC support for future kernel releases.
Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 6650 XT / RX 6750 XT / RX 6950 XT models as RDNA2 refreshed for 2022 with higher clock speeds as an interim launch until RDNA3 graphics cards debut later in 2022. Up for Linux benchmarking today is a look at the Radeon RX 6750 XT open-source driver performance using an ASRock Challenger Pro Radeon RX 6750 XT 12GB.
Just one week after Vulkan 1.3.213 released with its four new extensions, which included an update to the ray-tracing support, Vulkan 1.3.214 is out today with various fixes while introducing just one new extension.
AMD's Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for next-generation RDNA3 GPU support.
For over the past year we've seen various patches posted by AMD engineers with a state effort around preparations for the Frontier supercomputer. Most of these patches have involved memory handling under Linux and the special purpose memory handling between the CPU/GPUs. Published on Monday was their latest work on coherent device memory mappings for the Linux kernel.
Microsoft has another open-source driver they are working to get upstreamed into the Linux kernel.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 betas began rolling out in March and now this distribution with shared sources to SUSE Linux Enterprise has advanced to the release candidate period.
Last week AMD quietly released a new Radeon Software for Linux driver package focused on providing their fully open-source "Open" and "PRO" (featuring some proprietary components, OpenGL / Vulkan) for enterprise Linux distributions.
It's been nearly one year since the release of Inkscape 1.1 while today it has been succeeded by Inkscape 1.2 as a major feature update.
After taking a few extra weeks to bake, FreeBSD 13.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this leading BSD operating system.
PNY recently sent over their new XLR8 Gaming REV 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3600MHz memory that only lists compatibility with Microsoft Windows 11 and older, but fear not, it does work fine for Linux gamers and others looking for DDR4-3600 memory with RGB lighting and running well with the latest Intel and AMD processors.
While not as exciting as last week's NVIDIA 515 series Linux driver that kicks off their open-source Linux kernel driver effort, but today they issued a minor point release for the current stable 510 series as well as updating their prior legacy driver branches.
Last week marked the first update to the jemalloc memory allocation library since August of 2019. This malloc() implementation focused concurrency and memory fragmentation avoidance has seen more speed optimizations and other improvements in this new jemalloc 5.3 release.
In addition to Linux 5.19 set to add NVMe support for the Apple M1 systems, the Apple eFuse driver also from the open-source community is geared up for landing in this next version of the Linux kernel.
Consulting firm Igalia that has been working on the Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has published a summary of recent accomplishments for this Mesa solution.
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative.
Google engineer Sami Tolvanen has posted the second "request for comments" patch series on KCFI as a Control-Flow Integrity implementation better geared for Linux kernel usage than the existing CFI support.
Mesa developer Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added a NIR varying linker for GLSL.
Linus Torvalds has released what is likely the last release candidate before officially declaring Linux 5.18 next weekend if all goes according to plan.
PAPPL as the free software project started by CUPS founder Michael Sweet after departing Apple more than two years ago, this C-based framework/library for creating CUPS Printer Applications is out with a major feature release.
An interesting Linux kernel patch series was posted this week to address inconsistent NUMA imbalancing behavior for at least some workloads. In such cases these patches address performance differences seen over the past number of Linux kernel releases going on for a while.
In addition to Linux 5.19 being the kernel set to have DG2/Alchemist graphics support in better shape with the IDs now (finally) being added and compute support being ready, this next kernel should boast improved power management handling for these "Alchemist" Arc Graphics GPUs.
The Solarflare "SFC" network driver within the Linux kernel for their high performance network adapters, owned by Xilinx and now owned by AMD, is seeing some restructuring with the next version of the Linux kernel. The intention is on shifting older network hardware to a separate kernel module/driver so improvements and new hardware support can be the focus with this main Solarflare Linux network driver.
MSM DRM driver and Freedreno creator Rob Clark continues leading the charge on open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics/display support for Linux in this effort that started out as a reverse-engineering project years ago. This past week Rob sent in the last batch of MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver updates intended for the Linux 5.19 kernel.
With the tenth iteration of the LoongArch CPU architecture patches published on Saturday, it's looking like work is settling down and this Chinese MIPS-derived, RISC-V-inspired architecture could soon be going mainline.
For those using Keychron keyboards for being wireless, mechanical keyboards they will be better supported with the Linux 5.19 kernel.
Merged this week were some minor changes to AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL open-source driver around the shader selector code. One of the changes in particular though is noteworthy.
Released on Friday was OpenJPEG 2.5 as the newest update to this open-source JPEG 2000 image library. Notable with this new release for this BSD 2-clause library is now supporting high-throughput "HTJ2K" decoding.
Released on Friday was systemd 251-rc3 as what should be the last planned release candidate for this first major feature update since last December.
It was another week of seeing lots of Plasma Wayland session fixes and improvements.
A feature of Thunderbolt seemingly not widely leveraged is allowing two distinct hosts/systems to be connected over a Thunderbolt cable that can then be used for tunneling arbitrary data packets using high-speed DMA rings. Should you find yourself using such a setup, starting with Linux 5.19+ it should open the door for being much faster when running on latest-generation Intel hardware for USB4/Thunderbolt.
Following the groundwork laid in Linux 5.18, Intel VT-x's IPI Virtualization support is set to be introduced with the Linux 5.19 kernel for supporting this new hardware capability found with Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors.
It was just last week that GCC 12.1 was released and already it's being used by the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution as of today's build.
Those using the Chromium web browser on Ubuntu by way of the Snap package, the latest build has now enabled (optional) Wayland support.
Building off last month's Ubuntu 22.04 Long-Term Support release, Canonical today has published the beta builds of the upcoming Ubuntu Core 22.
Back in early March Intel engineers posted a Linux driver for new functionality called In-Field Scan used for silicon failure testing. Barring any last minute issues, that Intel IFS driver should be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle.
Prominent Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source driver team has begun working on GFX11 support for this driver ahead of AMD RDNA3 graphics cards launching later this year.
The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library this morning merged AVIF muxing support for this image format based on the AV1 royalty-free video codec technology.
NetworkManager 1.38 is now available for this widely-used software on the Linux desktop (and elsewhere) for managing wired and wireless network interfaces.
Earlier this week Arch Linux set the WirePlumber package to replace PipeWire-Media-Session. WirePlumber is the modern, feature-rich session manager for PipeWire and much better off than the reference PipeWire-Media-Session manager that is effectively unmaintained. But Arch Linux developers are now calling this premature and have reverted the change.
In addition to a new development release of Godot 4.0 out today, the other high profile open-source 3D game engine is Open 3D Engine (O3DE) that started last year from Amazon's Lumberyard Engine and now under the Linux Foundation's Open 3D Foundation. Out today is O3DE 22.05 for this high profile free software 3D game engine.
The AMD-owned Xilinx posted a new patch series today implementing a new DRM display driver for supporting their soft MIPI DSI Tx subsystem IP.
Given the NVIDIA open-source kernel driver code announcement from yesterday and also the Linux 5.19 merge window coming up soon with a host of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements and starting to prepare support for RDNA3, it's time for some fun with numbers around driver sizes.
Godot 4.0 continues working its way towards release as the most acclaimed open-source game engine. Godot 4.0 brings Vulkan rendering, OpenXR support, and a ton of other features covered in the past few years for making it more competitive with commercial game engines. Out this morning is Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 with a few more improvements worth noting.
While open-source fans this morning are celebrating NVIDIA finally publishing open-source kernel driver code as a step to opening up their driver, open-source AMD Radeon driver developers are proceeding as normal and undeterred by NVIDIA's open kernel-only approach. Another batch of AMD graphics code was sent in this morning to DRM-Next and then over in user-space Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed more task shader code.
While this week Microsoft issued a production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as its in-house Linux distribution, they are continuing to maintain CBL-Mariner 1.0 for the time being and have overnight issued its newest monthly release.
Released on Wednesday alongside the R515 NVIDIA Linux driver beta and the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver announcement was the launch of CUDA 11.7.