One of the patches to be picked up by the Linux 6.6 kernel this week brings back REP MOSQ for user-access on CPUs without Enhanced REP MOVSB (ERMS) support. In turn this can equate to some performance benefits on AMD CPUs lacking ERMS…

Source: Phoronix – Some AMD CPUs To Benefit From New Micro-Optimization In Linux 6.6

Manjaro 23.0 “Uranos” has been released as the latest version of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux…

Source: Phoronix – Manjaro 23.0 Released With GNOME 44, KDE Plasma 5.27 & Xfce 4.18 Desktop Options

The decision last month for the Linux kernel to disable random number gemeration (RNG) for all AMD fTPMs ended up having some unintended consequences on Intel systems that ended up breaking S3 suspend behavior…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Fix Incoming For Intel Fallout After The Kernel Disabled Buggy AMD fTPM RNG

Microsoft continues improving the Hyper-V support within the Linux kernel for benefiting Linux guest VMs running within this hypervisor on Windows. With Linux 6.6 the Hyper-V code adds support for SEV-SNP secure guests on the AMD EPYC side while over on the Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids side is initial support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) protected guests…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft Adds AMD SEV-SNP & Intel TDX Guest Support To Hyper-V With Linux 6.6

It’s been nearly four months since the release of DXVK 2.2 for this Direct3D 9/10/11 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux. Out today is DXVK 2.3 as the latest major step forward for the project…

Source: Phoronix – DXVK 2.3 Brings Presentation Improvements, More Game Fixes, “hideNvidiaGpu” Option

The ACPI and power management updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – AMD P-State Fixes & Other Power Management Changes For Linux 6.6

Released at the end of August was GNU Coreutils 9.4 while out this weekend is uutils 0.0.21 as the open-source, Rust-written re-implementation of the Coreutils utilities…

Source: Phoronix – uutils 0.0.21 Released With More Improvements For GNU Coreutils Written In Rust

A set of printk clean-ups were sent in today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. These clean-ups are important as they are a stepping stone towards the threaded / atomic console printing and in turn that is the last major blocker before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can finally be upstreamed in the kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Printk Cleanups Ready For Linux 6.6 – Stepping Towards Threaded/Atomic Console Printing

Fwupd 1.9.5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for enabling system and peripheral firmware updating under Linux that ties into the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). With the Fwupd 1.9.5 some additional devices are now supported plus there are some other core improvements…

Source: Phoronix – Fwupd 1.9.5 Released With Optional Passim Support, Firmware Updating For New Devices

Armbian 23.08 is out as the latest quarterly update to this Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for use on Arm single board computers and other devices…

Source: Phoronix – Armbian 23.08 Released With Work-In-Progress ThinkPad X13s Support, New SBCs

As part of the “smp/core” changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.6 kernel, partial SMT enablement landed for processors that support more than two threads per physical core to allow greater run-time control over just how many threads to enable…

Source: Phoronix – Partial SMT Enablement Support Lands For Linux 6.6

OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels…

Source: Phoronix – OpenBLAS 0.3.24 Released With Intel Sapphire Rapids Improvements, Apple M2 Detection

With the EXT4 file-system updates for Linux 6.6 there is mostly some code clean-ups and other bug fixing. But one change in particular stands out for its performance impact…

Source: Phoronix – EXT4 Lands A Nice Performance Improvement For Appending To Delalloc Files

There are new and improved gaming controller and peripheral support to find with the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Stadia Controller Rumbles & New Gaming Peripherals Supported By Linux 6.6

Among the many changes to land during this first week of the Linux 6.6 cycle were the x86 CPU microcode loader updates that now unconditionally makes that support part of the x86/x86_64 kernel builds…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Unconditionally Enables x86 CPU Microcode Loading Support

Going along with AMD’s work on AMD openSIL for open-sourcing the CPU silicon initialization code to ultimately replace AGESA in future hardware platforms, the initial EPYC “Genoa” code for Coreboot has been upstreamed along with the Onyx motherboard target…

Source: Phoronix – Initial AMD EPYC Genoa Support Added To Coreboot, New Onyx Motherboard Target

The Bcachefs file-system code born out of the Linux kernel’s block cache code was submitted for Linux 6.5 but ultimately rejected. Bcachefs is now trying again to land for the current Linux 6.6 merge window…

Source: Phoronix – Bcachefs File-System Re-Submitted For Linux 6.6

Debian developers will be discontinuing their 32-bit MIPS little-endian “mipsel” CPU architecture port moving forward…

Source: Phoronix – Debian Dropping Its 32-bit MIPS Little Endian “mipsel” Port

The EROFS read-only file-system and F2FS Flash Friendly File-System were among the FS updates to land this week for Linux 6.6 — in addition to marking ReiserFS as obsolete…

Source: Phoronix – EROFS Lands DEFLATE Compression, F2FS Improves Zoned Devices In Linux 6.6

Sriram Ramkrishna at Intel, who serves as the community manager and developer relations for oneAPI, held a virtual oneAPI meetup this week with Red Hat’s David Airlie. Airlie should not need any introduction for longtime Phoronix readers given his longtime contributions to the Linux kernel graphics drivers, Mesa, and related open-source graphics work at Red Hat. Airlie shared some interesting remarks around the current Linux GPU compute stacks from the different vendors and associated challenges…

Source: Phoronix – David Airlie Shares His Thoughts On Current Challenges With Linux GPU Compute Stacks