While many Linux gamers are all-set these days by making use of Steam and leveraging Valve’s Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux, for those running macOS or also wishing to enjoy more office/application-oriented Windows software on Linux support, CodeWeavers is out today with CrossOver 23 as the newest release of their commercial Wine-based software…

Source: Phoronix – CrossOver 23 Enables EA App On Linux, Many Fixes

With the Intel Downfall vulnerability made public last week (also known as GDS – “Gather Data Sampling”) there can be a sizable hit to AVX workloads making use of the GATHER instructions. For helping to lower the impact of Downfall/GDS on mitigated systems, Intel has made a change to the GNU Compiler Collection to disable GATHER generation in vectorization for Intel CPU families affected by this vulnerability…

Source: Phoronix – GCC Compiler Adds Software Workaround To Avoid Intel Downfall Performance Hit

Distrobox as the open-source project allowing easy access to running other distributions/apps via Podman and Docker has merged support for ChromeOS…

Source: Phoronix – Distrobox Adds Support For ChromeOS – Allowing More Linux Apps To Run On Chromebooks

In addition to Debian promoting RISC-V to an official CPU architecture for the newly in development Debian 13 cycle, another CPU architecture/port change is adding LoongArch “Loong64” as a new Debian Port…

Source: Phoronix – LoongArch “Loong64” Added To Debian Ports

XWayland 23.2 is out as stable today for this X.Org Server code for enjoying X11 window/client support within Wayland compositors. Several new features are implemented for this XWayland 23.2 milestone…

Source: Phoronix – XWayland 23.2 Released With Tearing Control, Resizable Rootful, EI Support

Mozilla Firefox has merged Wayland fractional-scale-v1 protocol support for handling fractional scaling with the web browser on the Linux desktop…

Source: Phoronix – Firefox Lands Wayland Fractional Scaling Support

Imagination Technologies has posted the fifth iteration of their driver patches for supporting PowerVR Rogue graphics with an open-source Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that will go along with their Mesa PVR Vulkan driver…

Source: Phoronix – Imagination Tech Posts Updated PowerVR Linux DRM Driver

Back in February 2022 Intel announced plans to acquire Tower Semiconductor. However, one and a half years later the deal is now being called off due to failure to obtain regulatory approval…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Acquisition Of Tower Semiconductor Falls Through

Intel this afternoon released the Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) v1.2 SDK as this gaming image upscaling tech that leverages AI deep learning for better performance and less image degradation on Intel Arc Graphics as well as from other GPU vendors…

Source: Phoronix – Intel XeSS 1.2 Released – Xe Super Sampling Still Driven By Some Windows Binary Blobs

Chrome 116 is out today as the newest stable version of Google’s web browser…

Source: Phoronix – Chrome 116 Released With Document Picture-In-Picture API

Last week the AMD Inception vulnerability was made public as a speculative side channel attack affecting Zen processors and different mitigation options based on the CPU generation. There wasn’t too much communication around the performance implications of mitigating Inception while over the past week I have begun benchmarking the software and microcode updates on Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking The Performance Impact To AMD Inception Mitigations

Devuan is still alive and well for those wanting to run Debian GNU/Linux but without systemd. Devuan 5.0 is out today as the newest distro release that is now rebased atop Debian 12 Bookworm…

Source: Phoronix – Devuan 5.0 Released For Debian 12 Without systemd

Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark…

Source: Phoronix – Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider

Maíra Canal with Igalia has sent out a set of patches for exposing GPU usage statistics for the Broadcom graphics processor found within the Raspberry Pi 4 single b oard computers…

Source: Phoronix – Raspberry Pi V3D Driver Gaining Per-Process GPU Usage Stats

AMD’s Preferred Core feature continues working its way toward the Linux kernel for this functionality that’s been around since Zen 2…

Source: Phoronix – AMD P-State Preferred Core Patches For Linux Updated, Will Be Enabled By Default

The Intel Platform Environment Control Interface (PECI) changes have been prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle and include extending support for including 4th Gen Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” server platforms…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Sapphire Rapids PECI Support Coming With Linux 6.6

A few days ago Intel compiler expert H.J. Lu landed an FMA-optimized log2 function for the GNU C Library that could yield up to a 69% performance improvement on tested Intel Skylake processors. Merged today to Glibc Git was another FMA-optimized function…

Source: Phoronix – Glibc Git Lands Another FMA-Optimized Function – 24% Mean Improvement

Intel engineers are working on enhancing the x86_64 CPU microcode updating experience under Linux and in particular the work is ultimately around better supporting of late microcode loading on Linux for Intel systems with a primary focus on Intel servers / enterprise users…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Making Improvements For CPU Microcode Updating Under Linux

An update on the Go programming language roadmap was shared today that highlights some recent improvements for backward compatibility to Go and why the developers now no longer expect to ever have a “Go 2” release that would break compatibility with existing Go 1.x programs…

Source: Phoronix – Go 2 For “Breaking With The Past” Will Never Come

With the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle another exciting change was recently queued up within the block subsystem’s “for-next” branch: IO_uring futex/futexv support…

Source: Phoronix – IO_uring Adding Support For Vectored FUTEX Waits In Linux 6.6