OpenZFS 2.2 has been in the works to provide Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksumming, block cloning and other new features. It’s looking like that release will be wrapped up soon while released on Thursday was v2.2-rc4 to help encourage last minute testing of this file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems…

Source: Phoronix – OpenZFS 2.2-rc4 Delivers Last Minute Fixes

As a big win for Intel’s QuickAssist Technology (QAT) accelerator found as an option with Sapphire Rapids processors and prior QAT hardware, there’s been a QAT Zstd plug-in to provide big performance/efficiency benefits. Version 0.1 of that plug-in was released today…

Source: Phoronix – Intel QAT Zstd Plugin v0.1 Released For Speeding Up Zstandard Compression

Going along with KDE Plasma 6.0 releasing in early February will also be the Qt6-based KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6 happening in-sync…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Frameworks 6 & Qt6’ed Gear Apps Will Release Alongside Plasma 6.0 In February

In addition to the notable sound changes that merged last week for Linux 6.6 that included AMD VanGogh SOF support and enablement around a Valve “Galileo” device, sent in via the MFD pull request this week is work enabling the new Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Lands Support For The Cirrus Logic CS42L43 Audio Codec

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window were the x86 platform driver updates, which bring a few interesting Intel/AMD laptop improvements as well as a new driver to support altering select HP BIOS settings from within the confines of Linux…

Source: Phoronix – New ASUS Laptop Features & HP BIOS Settings Driver For Linux 6.6

As covered in the launch-day Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT Linux review/testing, there is already upstream open-source driver support for these new RDNA3 graphics cards in recent versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. It’s a pleasant open-source out-of-the-box experience with the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the possible exception of just needing to grab the recent AMDGPU firmware. But for those running older, enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD has now released the Radeon Software for Linux 23.20 driver package to also enable the RX 7700/7800 XT support on those enterprise operating systems…

Source: Phoronix – Radeon Software For Linux 23.20 Brings RX 7700 XT / RX 7800 XT Support

As an experimental feature for next month’s Ubuntu 23.10 release, Canonical is introducing initial support for TPM-based full disk encryption to make use of your system’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The downside though is this extra security relies on Snaps, including for the kernel and GRUB bootloader…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Adding Experimental TPM-Backed Full Disk Encryption

AMD today published version 1.2 of their Unified Inference Frontend (UIF) that is for supporting deep learning inference across AMD CPUs, GPUs, as well as Versal adaptive SoCs and FPGAs. AMD UIF aims to accelerate AI inference across all AMD compute platforms with machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. With UIF 1.2 adds initial support for Radeon GPUs…

Source: Phoronix – AMD UIF 1.2 Released With Initial Radeon GPU Support

As part of a monthly status update concerning Plasma 6 development, KDE developer Nate Graham confirmed that the team is planning to release Plasma 6.0 in February of 2024…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6.0 Planned For Release In Early February

Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan Linux driver has landed a set of 15 patches that can further help the Linux gaming performance for those using DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Arc Graphics Enjoy Another Open-Source Vulkan Driver Performance Optimization

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support…

Source: Phoronix – OpenSSL 3.2 Alpha Released With Client-Side QUIC, Raw Public Key, SM4-XTS

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series…

Source: Phoronix – TURNIP Vulkan Driver Lands Initial Support For Adreno A730/A740 GPUs

In addition to the HID updates bringing rumble for Google’s Stadia controller and other gaming peripheral improvements, the input subsystem updates were sent out this week for Linux 6.6 that bring more enhancements for Linux gamers. In particular, the common XPad driver saw some additions for this next kernel version…

Source: Phoronix – XPad Driver Extends Gaming Controller Support With Linux 6.6

A few days ago Bcachefs was proposed for inclusion to Linux 6.6 after it failed to be pulled for the prior Linux 6.5 kernel cycle. Since then we’ve been waiting to see what action Linus Torvalds would take with including Bcachefs… He’s finally commented on it today but remains to be seen if it will land for this kernel release…

Source: Phoronix – Linus Torvalds Comments On Bcachefs Prospects For Linux 6.6

Igalia developers are working on extending the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel graphics driver, which is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi devices, to support the notion of “CPU jobs” in kernel space to assist in their Vulkan support. These CPU jobs are for assisting the support where their Broadcom GPU driver isn’t capable of some Vulkan commands and thus needs to be punted off and handled by the processor…

Source: Phoronix – Raspberry Pi’s V3D Kernel Driver Prepares For “CPU Jobs” To Assist Vulkan

The Ceph changes were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window and with it comes one big shiny feature addition: support for making use of the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework…

Source: Phoronix – CephFS Completes Multi-Year Effort Adding FSCRYPT Support

The release candidates were tagged this morning of GNOME Shell and Mutter ahead of the “GNOME 45.rc” test release coming out within the next few days. With the release candidates are some last-minute changes worth mentioning…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME Mutter 45 Release Candidate Brings Meta Toolkit Library, Other Last Minute Work

Last month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT graphics cards while today these graphics cards go on sale for $449 and $499 USD, respectively. Today also marks the review embargo lift so I’m now able to talk about the Linux support and performance for these new RDNA3 graphics cards that are designed for 1440p gaming,

Source: Phoronix – AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT & RX 7700 XT Linux Performance

On the AMD CPU side of the house, one of the patch series we are looking forward to seeing upstreamed in the Linux kernel is the AMD Preferred Core functionality that was initially sent out this summer. This AMD Preferred Core handling is built onto the AMD P-State driver and has been undergoing a few rounds of iteration with the latest “v5” patches having been posted this week…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Preferred Core Patches Updated For Linux

The Linux 6.6 FUSE driver code for enabling file-systems in user-space is adding support for STATX to the protocol as part of focusing on enabling file birth time “btime” support…

Source: Phoronix – FUSE Adds Initial Support For Statx, File Birth Times For File-Systems In User-Space