GNU Shepherd is the Guile-written service manager for handling daemons that is most notably used by the GNU Guix project as an alternative to the likes of SysV and systemd. With today’s GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 some long-standing issues have finally been resolved…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Shepherd 0.10.2 Service Manager Fixes Some Long-Standing Issues

Merged to Mesa 23.2-devel recently was an Intel Arc Graphics driver change to improve performance. This ended up being a rather significant improvement to performance and in today’s article is a look at the performance impact of the recent Mesa work by Intel engineers to better the Arc Graphics family.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Arc Graphics Enjoy Nice ~10% Speedup With Recent Open-Source Linux Driver

Merged for Linux 6.5 was initial MIDI 2.0 support for the necessary USB audio and raw MIDI drivers to support this major MIDI update. Being worked on now for merging into a future kernel release is the USB gadget driver support around MIDI 2.0…

Source: Phoronix – More MIDI 2.0 Code Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel

With the Intel Xeon Max testing at Phoronix that’s been ongoing so far for the past month on Phoronix has all been done within the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR rackmount server. This 2U dual socket platform for 4th Gen Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors has been working out well and provides a robust feature set while working out well for all of my Linux testing thus far.

Source: Phoronix – Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-221H-TNR / X13DEM Working Well For Dual Socket Xeon Max

The High Precision Event Timer (HPET) has long been a source of issues for Linux developers and it turns out systems relying on HPET rather than the CPU’s TSC have in recent months suffered significant performance degradation with the Mesa OpenGL driver code…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa Fixes A Large Performance Regression For Systems Using HPET

New AMDGPU targets seeing the initial plumbing merged today for LLVM 17 are GFX1150 and GFX1151 as upcoming AMD APU products…

Source: Phoronix – AMD GFX1150 & GFX1151 Targets Being Added To AMDGPU LLVM Backend

GNU Boot 20230717 has been released as the fork of Libreboot that in turn is a downstream of Coreboot focused on providing system firmware support only where they are fully free software. With GNU Boot the game is upped further by removing select motherboard ports and documentation where they do not comply with the GNU System Distribution Guidelines…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Boot 20230717 Released For Freeing The Firmware On Some Old Hardware

For two years now Arch Linux’s official install media has been shipping with archinstall as a nice, text-based installer for more quickly setting up an Arch Linux environment. In preparation for release now is Archinstall 2.6 as the next feature release while available for testing today is the release candidate…

Source: Phoronix – Arch Linux Installer Archinstall 2.6 Preparing New Features

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions…

Source: Phoronix – Meson 1.2 Build System Released

The newest weekly test version of the Linux 6.5 kernel is now available for evaluation and looking out for any bugs/regressions…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.5-rc2 Released With Some Early AMD Family 26 Bits, Fixing Up Some KCFI Assembly

Linux Mint 21.2 has been released today as the newest update to this Ubuntu 22.04 LTS based Linux distribution known for its Cinnamon desktop environment and other Linux desktop focused refinements…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Mint 21.2 Released With Cinnamon Enhancements, Other Desktop Polishing

System76 has contributed Intel Core Raptor Lake HX support to Coreboot with some minor additions over the existing Raptor Lake “RPL” code as well as adding their new Adder WS 3 laptop to upstream Coreboot…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Raptor Lake HX, System76 Adder WS 3 Added To Coreboot

Back in April I pointed out some new AMD patches at the time for enabling a new “Dynamic Boost Control” feature that hasn’t been widely talked about by AMD yet for allowing more frequency/power controls around Ryzen SoCs. But making this power/performance feature controversial is that it requires authentication with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) for activation with user-space blobs for tapping this greater control of the hardware. This AMD Dynamic Boost Control feature now looks like it is ready for merging into Linux 6.6…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Dynamic Boost Control Feature Set For Introduction In Linux 6.6

Similar to the Dell WMI system management driver and Lenovo’s Think-LMI driver, the HP-BIOSCFG driver now poised for introduction in Linux 6.6 allows for managing and configuring BIOS settings on capable HP laptops/desktops from under Linux itself…

Source: Phoronix – HP BIOS Management/Configuration Driver Coming For Linux 6.6

Queued up ahead of the Linux 6.6 cycle later this summer is a new input driver for the Azoteq IQS7210A/7211A/E controllers…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 To Add New Input Driver Used By Wearable Fitness Devices

For the past few months Intel has been working on a new cluster scheduling implementation for their hybrid CPUs. This rework was due to their earlier cluster scheduling code not working out so well for the likes of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors while this new patch series can at least help some workloads in the ~1% range…

Source: Phoronix – Cluster Scheduling For Intel Hybrid CPUs Looks Like It Will Be Ready For Linux 6.6

Btrfs has long provided a built-in integrity checker tool into the file-system driver. However, slated for Linux 6.6 is deprecating of this integrity checker…

Source: Phoronix – Btrfs Deprecating Its Integrity Checker Tool

Ahead of the Linux 6.5-rc2 release tomorrow there was a set of x86/x86_64 kernel changes merged overnight to deal with some weaknesses in the kernel’s Control Flow Integrity (kCFI) / FineIBT (Indirect Branch Tracking) code…

Source: Phoronix – Linux kCFI/FineIBT Weaknesses Addressed By Rewriting Some Assembly In C

With all the news in recent weeks following Red Hat’s decision to limit access to RHEL sources that in turn lead to changes for AlmaLinux, finding new ways to obtain sources at Rocky Linux, interesting statements from Oracle, and even SUSE forking RHEL. The public RHEL sources now will basically be the upstream CentOS Stream code for which future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions are ultimately based. The CentOS Project issued a new statement on Friday…

Source: Phoronix – CentOS Project Promotes They Are “Open To All”

Earlier this month brought the release of systemd 254-rc1 with a new soft-reboot mechanism, officially deprecating System V scripts, a new systemd-battery-check process that runs at boot to check any system battery level status, and various other changes. On Friday systemd 254-rc2 was released with a few more changes…

Source: Phoronix – systemd 254-rc2 Brings A Few More Changes