The various Arm platform and SoC changes have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Adds Support For Intel Agilex 5 FPGAs, Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 2

While I have been eagerly following the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU initialization that will eventually replace AGESA, today AMD announced a new open-source firmware drop: the SEV firmware has been made open-source…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Publishes SEV Firmware As Open-Source

AMD’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are working on a new set of interfaces for user-space to support OverDrive overclocking. While AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking has been supported on Linux for years, the current interface isn’t sufficient for all the power/overclocking controls moving forward…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Working On New OverDrive GPU Overclocking Controls For Linux

Some code cleaning within the sysctl space of the Linux kernel will eventually eliminate around 64 bytes of bloat per array within the kernel where a sentinel can be removed…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Sysctl Cleaning To Eventually Erase ~64 Bytes Of Bloat Per Array

While we are eagerly awaiting ROCm support for more RDNA3 GPUs said to be coming later this calendar year, shipping Tuesday night was ROCm 5.6.1 as the newest point release for this open-source GPU compute stack…

Source: Phoronix – AMD ROCm 5.6.1 Compute Stack Released With A Few Fixes

MidnightBSD 3.1 is now available for this desktop-minded, FreeBSD-forked operating system that aims to be “the BSD for everyone” with an Xfce-based desktop and focus on ease of use…

Source: Phoronix – MidnightBSD 3.1 Released With Ravenports Integration

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) has been part of the mainline kernel for two decades to provide a security module implementing access control security policies and is now widely-used for enhancing the security of production Linux servers and other systems. Those that haven’t been involved with Linux for a long time may be unaware that SELinux originates from the US National Security Agency (NSA). But now with Linux 6.6 the NSA references are being removed…

Source: Phoronix – SELinux In Linux 6.6 Removes References To Its Origins At The US NSA

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA’s Proprietary Driver

XDG-Desktop-Portal as the portal front-end for Flatpaks is out with a new development release that brings accent color support to sandboxed desktop apps as well as other new features…

Source: Phoronix – XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.17.1 Released With Accent Color Support

GNU Coreutils 9.4 is out today as the latest version of this collection of utilities common to GNU/Linux systems and other platforms…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Coreutils 9.4 Adds Experimental “–enable-systemd” Option, Faster Split

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are a number of core networking improvements this cycle, support for various new wired and wireless chipsets, and improvements made to existing Ethernet and WiFi drivers…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Gale Peak, New BPF Features & Other Networking Changes For Linux 6.6

To help harden the Linux kernel from memory vulnerabilities and in particular heap spraying, set to be merged into the Linux 6.6 kernel is optional support for randomized slab caches for kmalloc() calls…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Adding Randomized Kmalloc Caches For Further System Hardening

Google is using their NEXT’23 conference today to announce that C3A instances are debuting in private preview form for these new AArch64 VMs powered by AmpereOne processors…

Source: Phoronix – Google Announces C3A Instances Coming, Powered By AmpereOne CPUs

Among the exciting early pull requests to land in the new Linux 6.6 kernel cycle are some nice improvements to the IOmap code that should yield some substantive I/O benefits with this new kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Lands “Pretty Juicy” IOmap Improvements, Lower Latency With IO_uring

The EEVDF scheduler code has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel. EEVDF replaces the existing CFS scheduler code. There is the likelihood of some performance regressions initially though but the developers will be working to address them as they arise. Additionally, this scheduler pull also re-introduces cluster scheduling for Intel Core hybrid processors…

Source: Phoronix – EEVDF Scheduler Merged For Linux 6.6, Intel Hybrid Cluster Scheduling Re-Introduced

ClamAV 1.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform anti-virus engine currently maintained by Cisco Systems…

Source: Phoronix – ClamAV 1.2 Now Extracts UDF Partitions, New systemd Timer

The Intel-led SVT-AV1 open-source AV1 video encoder is out with a major release that delivers on more performance improvements across the board…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s SVT-AV1 1.7 Video Encoder Delivers Faster Performance

Btrfs in Linux 6.5 brought various performance improvements and prior to that it was a busy cycle with Linux 6.4 while now with Linux 6.6 the Btrfs file-system driver is mostly centered on delivering fixes…

Source: Phoronix – Btrfs For Linux 6.6 Brings Fixes, Partially Recovers From Scrub Performance Regression

The Alliance For Open Media has released libavif 1.0, the reference library for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) with image encode and decode support…

Source: Phoronix – libavif 1.0 Released With Stable ABI, Experimental AV2 Support

For HotChips 2023, Intel has made some new disclosures around Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Talks Up 2024 Xeon Sierra Forest & Granite Rapids At Hot Chips