Still not over the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel are the real-time “RT” patches but it continues inching toward that long-awaited goal. Out today is v6.6-rc1-rt1 as the real-time kernel patch series updated against the initial Linux 6.6 Git state…

Source: Phoronix – Real-Time “RT” Patches Updated Against Linux 6.6 Git

During the Linux 6.6 merge window a pull request submitted the new “GenPD” subsystem. While the pull request did land for Linux 6.6, Linus Torvalds took issue with it — not because of the code but over the lack of clarity on what “GenPD” is for those not domain experts in this area. To help clear things up, GenPD is being renamed to “pmdomain” to provide a bit more clarity…

Source: Phoronix – Following Criticism By Linus Torvalds, GenPD Subsystem Renamed To “pmdomain”

Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 “LMDE 6” is now available in beta form for this desktop Linux distribution spin from the Linux Mint crew derived directly from Debian packages rather than Ubuntu…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 Reaches Beta

The firmware folks at 3mdeb have released Dasharo 1.1.2 for the MSI PRO Z690-A motherboard. In case you missed it, last year 3mdeb ported Coreboot/Dasharo to select MSI desktop motherboards that are readily available in retail channels and supporting the latest Intel processors. This started with the MSI PRO Z690-A and since extended to the Z790 series. 3mdeb has released an updated Dasharo build with some new features for replacing the proprietary BIOS on these motherboards…

Source: Phoronix – Coreboot-Based Dasharo Updated For MSI Z690-A With Raptor Lake S, MSI FLASHBIOS

AOMP 18.0-0 has been released as the newest version of AMD’s LLVM/Clang compiler downstream that is focused on providing the very latest patches around Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading and goes along with their ROCm compute stack…

Source: Phoronix – AMD AOMP 18.0-0 Compiler Brings Support For HIP Bundles, Zero Copy For MI300A

With the Linux 6.6 merge window over, here’s a look at the most interesting new features, hardware support, and other changes to find with this kernel that will debut as stable around the end of October.

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Features Include The EEVDF Scheduler, Shadow Stack, Intel IVSC, AMD DBC & More

Intel today announced Thunderbolt 5 as their next-gen Thunderbolt standard that will allow 80 Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth or a “Bandwidth Boost” mode of up to 120 Gbps…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Announces Thunderbolt 5 With 120 Gbps Bandwidth Boost

While the Linux 6.6 merge window is over, sent out today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes that include adding a quirk so that the tablet mode switch event properly occurs with the new ASUS ROG Flow X16 laptop…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6-rc2 Picking Up Quirk For ASUS ROG Flow X16 Tablet Mode Handling

Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver used by Linux systems is now enabling by default the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension for their graphics processors with mesh shader support…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Now Enables Mesh Shader Support By Default

While Bcachefs was not merged for the Linux 6.6 cycle with one of the concerns raised by Linus Torvalds being that it hadn’t been vetted via the “linux-next” staging area, that process has now begun to raise hopes of potentially seeing the new file-system driver introduced for Linux 6.7…

Source: Phoronix – Bcachefs Merged Into Linux-Next

One of the driver additions we’ve been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel that didn’t pan out in time for the recently closed Linux 6.6 merge window is the Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver as a modern alternative to their i915 driver. The Xe driver better supports non-x86 CPU architectures, better designed and more performant around their modern integrated and discrete GPUs, and overall is able to make better design choices and improvements in being a clean sheet driver design compared to all the code that has built up in i915 over the years. But for getting the Xe driver upstream even in experimental form, first some necessary DRM scheduler patches need to be ironed out…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s DRM Scheduler Patches Updated That Are A Prerequisite For Merging The Xe Driver

One of the new Linux networking features we’ve been looking forward to seeing in the kernel is TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO / RFC5925) as a means of improving TCP security and authenticity. The eleventh iteration of the TCP-AO patches were posted today for the Linux kernel with it looking like work on this network addition potentially wrapping up soon…

Source: Phoronix – TCP Authentication Option “TCP-AO” Support Nears For The Linux Kernel

Merged for Mesa 23.3 today is the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) to allow for the “PresentOptionAsyncMayTear” option that can be used to enable tearing under (X)Wayland if desiring peak performance at the cost of possible imperfect rendering…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.3 Lands Optional Support For Allowing Game Tearing On Wayland

The openSUSE Slowroll distribution is a middle-ground between the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution and the SUSE Linux Enterprise aligned openSUSE Leap with its fixed releases. The new openSUSE Slowroll is a rolling-release-like distribution with updates “every one or two months” but with constant bug/security fixes…

Source: Phoronix – openSUSE Slowroll Released As A Slower Alternative To openSUSE Tumbleweed

Sub-NUMA Clustering with Intel Xeon processors allows for splitting up the CPU cores, cache, and memory into multiple NUMA domains for enhancing the performance of NUMA-aware applications. While SNC can help in a number of cases especially plenty of HPC and server workloads, currently it’s not properly supported if making use of Resource Director Technology (RDT) on modern Intel CPUs. That is in the process of changing with new Linux kernel patches being worked on by Intel…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Fixing Up Sub-NUMA Clustering For Linux So That It Behaves With RDT

KDE developer David Edmundson has written an interesting blog post looking at robustness improvements coming with Qt 6.6 via QtWayland compositor handoffs support…

Source: Phoronix – Qt 6.6 Wayland Compositor Handoffs Look Promising For More Robust Experience

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve’s stellar Linux graphics/Proton team has released VKD3D-Proton 2.10 as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop Vulkan that allows for modern Windows games to run on Linux atop Steam Play…

Source: Phoronix – VKD3D-Proton 2.10 Released With More Performance Improvements, Game/Driver Workarounds

With the Linux 6.6 merge window the cgroup changes brought one change worth mentioning…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Enables Tracking Per-CPU Cgroup CPU Usage Stats

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” has merged support in its ray-tracing (RT) code path for monolithic pipelines…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Ray-Tracing Monolithic Pipelines Support Merged For Better Performance

The first release candidate of the inaugural GNU Boot has been released with users sought to try out this fork of Libreboot that in turn is derived from Coreboot…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Boot 0.1 RC1 Released For This Coreboot/Libreboot Fork