Following the release of Wine 8.0 stable from a week and a half ago, Wine 8.1 is out today as the first bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. These Wine 8.x development snapshots will then culminate with the release of Wine 9.0 next year…

Source: Phoronix – Wine 8.1 Released – Now Exposed As “Windows 10” For New Prefixes

Originally posted two years ago were Linux kernel patches for bringing up of CPU cores in parallel to speed-up the Linux boot process. With the growing core counts of servers and even high-end desktops / HEDT platforms, this parallel bring-up can lead to significant time savings at boot. The work, unfortunately, stalled but has now been revised…

Source: Phoronix – Work Revived On Parallel CPU Bring-Up To Boot Linux Faster On Large Systems/Servers

Following last month’s release of systemd 253-rc1 with many new features and changes in tow, out today is a second release candidate and is piling yet more features into this Linux system and service manager…

Source: Phoronix – systemd 253-rc2 Released With More Changes To This System & Service Manager

While there is Rusticl as the first Rust language code within Mesa as a modern OpenCL implementation in Gallium3D, for possible future driver efforts there is some initial exploratory work being done around coming up with bindings to support writing of Vulkan drivers with Rust…

Source: Phoronix – Experimenting Underway To Support Mesa Vulkan Drivers Written In Rust

The GNU Debugger “GDB” has landed initial support for being able to debug AMDGPU/ROCm platform code with a preliminary focus on HIP programs…

Source: Phoronix – GNU Debugger Adds Support For Debugging AMD ROCm / HIP Code

The RPM package manager code has added support for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels that allow for newer baseline targets than conventional x86_64. This support in RPM allows for installing RPMs built for newer feature levels on capable hardware…

Source: Phoronix – RPM Lands Support For x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress…

Source: Phoronix – More Of Valve’s RADV Optimizations Around Fast-Linking Reach Mesa 23.1

LibreOffice 7.5 released on-schedule this morning as the newest version of this cross-platform, free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office…

Source: Phoronix – LibreOffice 7.5 Released With Improved Dark Mode, Better PDF Exporting

Microsoft on Wednesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230126-2.0 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of use-cases from within Azure infrastructure over to WSL purposes…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft CBL-Mariner 2.0 Update Adds New PipeWire, Other Changes

Arm ended out January by publishing an early request for comments (RFC) version of its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) support for the Linux kernel so there can be KVM virtualization integration around Arm CCA, a KVM user-space ABI for managing Realms, and Linux guest support for Arm Realms…

Source: Phoronix – Arm Publishes Initial Confidential Compute Architecture “CCA” Code For Linux VMs

While the Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers were aiming for release this week, due to outstanding blocker bugs it has instead resulted in a fourth weekly release candidate…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.0-rc4 Released Due To Blocker Bugs

Valve has just published their Steam Survey results for the month of January. Apple macOS has eaten a tiny bit of marketshare from Windows while on a percentage basis there is no change for Linux…

Source: Phoronix – Steam Survey Results Start 2023 With Linux Marketshare Flat

Google has released a new version of the Go programming language that with today’s v1.20 release come a number of notable additions as well as gutting out support for older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Two features alone have me excited about Go 1.20: initial work on CPU architecture feature build flags like for x86_64 micro-architecture feature level handling and initial support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) builds…

Source: Phoronix – Go 1.20 Released With Preview PGO Support, CPU Architecture Feature Build Flags

Last week I wrote about Linux developers evaluating a new “DOITM” security mitigation for the latest Intel CPUs. While the cost for now of engaging the Data Operand Independent Timing Mode (DOITM) functionality is minimal, following internal Intel engineering discussions it looks like the Linux kernel patches will need to be re-worked with this functionality not intended to always be enabled…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s “DOITM” Security Feature Not Intended For Always-On Use, Linux Patches To Be Revised

Now that we are into February with AMD previously announced the month for learning more about their new Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache, this morning they revealed the firm availability dates and pricing…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Announces Ryzen 7800X3D / 7900X3D / 7950X3D Pricing & Availability

As scheduled, version 2.37 of the GNU C Library “glibc” was released this morning…

Source: Phoronix – GNU C Library “glibc” 2.37 Released

Intel this week held a presentation to talk up the progress they’ve made on their (Windows) graphics driver since launch for Arc Graphics where for many games there are double digit performance improvements to enjoy with the budget-friendly Arc Graphics A750 and A770 graphics cards…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Highlights Their Progress On Arc Graphics Drivers Since Launch

The last batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of next month’s Linux 6.3 merge window. Notable with this week’s changes are more low-level code improvements in preparation for future Intel graphics hardware platforms…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Making More Preparations For Enabling Future Graphics Platforms On Linux

Now that Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” shipped and the initial Linux support is all aligned, recently there has been an uptick in activity around Emerald Rapids and even Granite Rapids as its successor along with the Sierra Forest support. On the EMR front, the latest Linux driver activity is extending the In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for additional testing capabilities…

Source: Phoronix – Intel In-Field Scan Functionality Being Extended With Emerald Rapids

An optimization to Mesa’s shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam’s shader pre-caching…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.1 Lands Improvement For Better Handling Steam’s Shader Cache