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.
As outlined in yesterday's extensive article about NVIDIA's new open-source Linux kernel GPU driver, currently for consumer GeForce RTX GPUs the driver is considered of "alpha quality" while NVIDIA's initial focus has been on data center GPU support. In any event with having lots of Turing/Ampere GPUs around, I've been trying out this new open-source Linux kernel driver on the consumer GPUs. In particular, I've been curious about the performance of using this open-source kernel driver relative to the default, existing closed-source kernel driver. Here are some early benchmarks.
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.
AMD's graphics driver engineers continue being very active in volleying new open-source driver patches for GFX11 and other blocks making up their next-generation RDNA3 graphics processors.
Following yesterday's Intel Vision 2022 announcements there is a bit more news today. In particular, Intel is announcing Project Amber.
Back in March marked the release of Qt 5.15.3 as open-source, one year after it was released to commercial customers of The Qt Company. Today a similar Qt 5.15.4 open-source release is now available, one year after its commercial release.
Back in December 2020 Intel's programming reference manual was updated to cover Linear Address Masking (LAM) as a future CPU feature and there was some GNU toolchain activity around LAM while not much to report on the effort since then -- until today. A revised "request for comments" has been posted on the Intel Linear Address Masking enabling for the Linux kernel that allows for using untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses to be used for storing arbitrary software metadata.
There was hope that Mesa 22.1 would have been released this week but instead it's been diveted to at least next week due to more than 90 patches flowing in the past week. As such, today we have Mesa 22.1-rc5 for another week of testing.
Last month was the surprising news of open-source Coreboot working on a readily available Intel Alder Lake motherboard. That work for the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard is being carried out by independent firmware consulting firm 3mdeb and using the Dasharo open-source firmware distribution with Coreboot.