While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs...
Earlier this year AMD disclosed the RMPOPT instruction that given the timing will seemingly be introduced with upcoming Zen 6 EPYC "Venice" processors. The RMPOPT feature amounts to a performance optimization for AMD EPYC SEV-SNP enabled servers by cutting down on the associated Reverse Map Table (RMP) overhead. Linux enablement of AMD RMPOPT remains ongoing and out this week is the latest iteration of the enablement...
Red Hat has contributed new system-wide tunables infrastructure to the GNU C Library "glibc" that allows specifying system-wide tunables via the new /etc/tunables.conf configuration file...
Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues taking special focus on AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era GPUs for enhancing the open-source graphics driver support for these aging graphics cards...
For those that prefer waiting until the first bug-fix/point release before upgrading to a major new feature series, GCC 16.2 is being planned for an early August release for delivering back-ported bug fixes to the GCC 16 compiler...
Last month on Phoronix there were 294 original news articles and 18 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Beyond Phoronix.com turning 22 years old in June, there were also a lot of exciting Linux hardware and open-source software developments worth recapping...
With modern laptops, proper platform/WMI drivers are becoming more depended upon not only for supporting all typical functionality from keyboards to backlights and other handling, but also for achieving proper performance. For many laptop vendors, the Linux platform drivers are maintained by the open-source community and actual customers. The latest example of the challenges of the community-maintained support rather than from the vendor is with the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614PR gaming laptop seeing inappropriate power values set in the open-source driver that were incorrect and led to lower power/performance than Windows...
The Asahi Linux project published a new blog post outlining recent development efforts in getting Apple Silicon hardware working with their downstream Linux distribution. There is ongoing work on bringing up Apple M3 support, fixing boot support for macOS 27 beta systems, Apple Video Decoder (AVD) support progress, and more...
NVIDIA engineers have been developing a new binary format for their GPU firmware images for use with the in-development, open-source Nova kernel driver. With this new TLV binary firmware format it aims to be easier to parse by their Rust-based driver code...
COSMIC 1.2 desktop environment is now available with improvements to COSMIC Files, COSMIC Term, COSMIC Edit, COSMIC Applets, COSMIC Setings, COSMIC Store, COSMIC Monitor, and COSMIC Greeter.
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