It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven’t been following Ubuntu’s own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.04 & 22.04.3 Installs Haven’t Been Following Their Own Security Best Practices

Tucked away within a merge to Mesa entitled, “intel/genxml: Support importing, which cuts the overall xml file size almost in half” Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are slowly beginning to start work on the “Xe2” graphics support to be found with Lunar Lake processors…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Starts Work On Enabling “Xe2” Graphics Within Their Open-Source Mesa Drivers

AMD on Thursday released ZenDNN 4.1 as the newest release of their Zen Deep Neural Network Library for accelerating inference workloads on AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. The ZenDNN library remains API compatible with Intel’s oneDNN library and helps for building out optimized AI workloads for use on AMD Zen processors…

Source: Phoronix – AMD ZenDNN 4.1 Released For Speeding Up Deep Learning Inference On Ryzen / EPYC CPUs

A Red Hat engineer has published patches to optionally allow delayed module signature verification in an effort to have a secure Linux system but to allow for faster boot times…

Source: Phoronix – Red Hat Working On Delayed Module Signature Verification To Speed-Up Linux Boot Times

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server…

Source: Phoronix – PostgreSQL 16 Released With More Performance Improvements, SIMD For x86 & Arm

The sdl12-compat project is an interesting effort to allow for aging software and games targeting the SDL 1.2 APIs to work atop this compatibility layer so it in turn runs atop the SDL2 libraries. With the sdl12-compat 1.2.66 release more games and other software are now successfully working on this library…

Source: Phoronix – sdl12-compat 1.2.66 Gets More Games/Software Working On This SDL2 Portability Layer

From my early testing thus far of the Linux 6.6 kernel in its very early state, some of the most impressive gains are happening on AMD’s high core count server processors, the EPYC 9754 “Bergamo” in particular is enjoying some stellar improvements for various server workloads on this forthcoming kernel.

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Delivers Some Impressive Gains For AMD EPYC 9754 “Bergamo” Server Performance

The Linux kernel currently allows disabling support for 32-bit programs and 32-bit system calls at compile-time, but a new option expected to be introduced with Linux 6.7 this winter will provide a new “ia32_emulation” boot time option to allow unconditionally disabling support for 32-bit programs and system calls…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 To Make It Easier To Toggle Support For x86 32-bit Programs

Back in July Intel announced AVX10 as the future of AVX-512 and how they ultimately plan to support more Advanced Vector Extensions capabilities on both future P and E cores. Since then they’ve begun making preparations to the open-source compiler toolchains around enabling AVX10…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Assembler Starts Getting Ready For Intel AVX10.1

The past two years AMD’s AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve’s Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware…

Source: Phoronix – AMD To Enable Seamless Boot Across Modern Radeon Graphics Hardware

One of the nifty new features with Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors not talked about much is the In-Field Scan (IFS) functionality for allowing various tests to be carried out prior to deploy the new processors or over time in the data center for trying to spot any silicon-level issues. IFS aims to uncover any processor issues not caught by ECC, parity checks, RAS, or other safeguards when new CPUs reach the data center or as they age over time…

Source: Phoronix – Intel IFS Driver Prepares For Granite Rapids & Sierra Forest

Red Hat multimedia expert Wim Taymans has released PipeWire 0.3.80 as the newest version of this open-source solution for efficiently handling video and audio streams on the Linux desktop…

Source: Phoronix – PipeWire 0.3.80 Released With Vulkan DMA-BUF Support, Tag Param

As part of the effort for enabling UEFI support with ReactOS, an open-source operating system re-implementing binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows, a development build of ReactOS is up and running on Valve’s Steam Deck handheld game console…

Source: Phoronix – ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Shown Running On Valve’s Steam Deck

While catching up on my Linux kernel benchmarking across different systems the Intel Core i9 13900K “Raptor Lake” desktop performance has been particularly volatile. Linux 6.5 is running slower for the Core i9 13900K compared to Linux 6.4 for a number of different workloads. Buckle up for a wild ride but the good news is a stable fix is forthcoming.

Source: Phoronix – A Nasty Performance Regression For Some Intel Systems Wound Up In Linux 6.5 Stable

When Canonical rolled out their new Flutter-based Ubuntu Linux desktop installer it lacked support for ZFS root file-system installations. Canonical has been quiet about their (Open)ZFS intentions after years of offering it as an Ubuntu install option with their prior installer, but for Ubuntu 23.10 this support is being restored…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Restores ZFS File-System Support In Its Installer

Fedora developers are looking at offering KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 in next year’s Fedora 40 release. With the upgrade to Plasma 6 it’s also planned by the Fedora packagers to drop support for the KDE X11 session — thereby just leaving the KDE on Wayland session…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40 Looks To Offer KDE Plasma 6 Desktop, Drop The KDE X11 Session

AMD announced today that their Versal HBM adaptive SoCs have entered production for these newest wares with high bandwidth memory…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Versal HBM Adaptive SoCs Enter Production

Intel’s open-source Compute Runtime 23.26.26690.22 was released today, which is a big update for this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero (L0) stack for Windows and Linux systems. Due to the summer holidays and Intel’s current release regiment for the Compute Runtime, v23.26.26690.22 is the first new release since mid-July…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Compute Runtime 23.26.26690.22 Is A Big Update For Intel’s OpenCL/L0 Stack

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking…

Source: Phoronix – Xfce’s Wayland Roadmap Updated

While Microsoft is known for their own set of security issues on Windows and related software, Microsoft on Patch Tuesday ended up releasing CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230904 as their open-source Linux distribution that with this update is primarily driven by security fixes…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft Issues Updated CBL-Mariner Linux Distro With Many Security Fixes