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

The USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates were merged this past weekend for the ongoing Linux 6.6 kernel merge window…

Source: Phoronix – USB MIDI 2.0 Gadget Function Driver Merged For Linux 6.6, Lunar Lake USB Work

Greg Kroah-Hartman last Friday sent out the “char/misc” changes for the Linux 6.6 kernel merge window that include the catch-all of different driver changes. This cycle the char/misc updates aren’t particularly exciting but the Intel PECI updates do stand-out…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 char/misc Brings Intel PECI Updates, Sapphire Rapids Support

After a hiatus due to the pandemic, systemd’s All Systems Go conference is returning next week to Berlin…

Source: Phoronix – systemd’s All Systems Go Conference Returns Next Week

Ahead of Intel expecting to formally reveal more Meteor Lake processor details in the coming weeks, Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver developers are ready to declare the new integrated graphics stable with the upstream Linux kernel — dropping the existing flag that treated them as experimental and not enabled by default unless passing a special kernel module parameter…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Ready To Declare Meteor Lake Linux Graphics Driver Support Stable

Masahiro Yamada submitted today all of the Kconfig feature updates targeting the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the Kconfig work is the “make xconfig” GUI seeing a port for Qt6 toolkit compatibility…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Bringing Qt6 Port To “make xconfig” Interface

Mesa 23.2 was supposed to have been released by now following a series of weekly release candidates that started in mid-July when feature work ended. After a five week hiatus, Mesa 23.2-rc3 is now available for testing…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.2-rc3 Released After Five Week Hiatus

AMD by way of their Xilinx acquisition has been running the Open Hardware Competition since 2015 for helping to drive new innovations around FPGAs and the ACAP compute platform. The winners of the AMD Open Hardware Competition 2023 were recently announced…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Open Hardware Competition Winners Announced For 2023

While this summer has been a busy season of benchmarking with the new AMD EPYC Bergamo processors providing up to 128-cores / 256-threads per socket and the new EPYC Genoa-X parts providing up to 1.1GB of L3 cache with 3D V-Cache to provide for excellent HPC performance, not everyone needs such levels of performance nor having the budget for such platforms. It’s always fun talking about the high-end server platforms, but at the opposite end AMD and their platform partners have been rolling out an equally interesting assortment of AMD Ryzen 7000 series based server products. With the Ryzen 9 7950X/7950X3D providing up to 16-cores / 32-threads, a growing number of Ryzen server motherboards supporting DDR5 ECC UDIMM, and a number of innovative Ryzen server platforms coming to market, it’s an interesting time to be after a budget-friendly server platform or other robust rackmount systems where looking for power efficient 16 cores or less configurations.

Source: Phoronix – AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Make For Compelling Budget Servers, Leading Performance & Value Over Xeon E

PoCL began as an open-source project providing a CPU-based OpenCL implementation and over the years has added support for various LLVM back-ends such as for targeting AMD HSA, Intel Level Zero, and NVIDIA CUDA/PTX with its OpenCL implementation. The latest back-end merged ahead of Portable Computing Language 5.0 is a remote back-end that allows for OpenCL codes to be transparently utilized on networked systems for distributed computing…

Source: Phoronix – PoCL-Remote Allows OpenCL To Be Transparently Used Across Networked Systems

Following Intel’s acquisition of Tower Semiconductor falling through due to failing to obtain all the necessary regulatory approvals, Intel and Tower today announced a foundry agreement…

Source: Phoronix – Intel & Tower Semiconductor Reach Foundry Agreement

The sound subsystem and audio driver updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window. Interesting about the sound work this cycle is a fair amount of work around AMD Van Gogh platforms, which so far is just the APU that’s known to power Valve’s Steam Deck…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Adds New Sound Support For AMD Van Gogh, Valve Galileo

Building off Friday’s release of Wine 8.15 is a new version of Hangover, the Wine-based software that aims to ease the deployment of Wine with x86/x86_64 Windows software support atop AArch64 processors and other CPU architectures…

Source: Phoronix – Hangover 8.15 Released With Box64 Integration As PE Library