VMware Updates Linux Patches For Running VMware Workstation Atop KVM
One of the biggest surprises of last year was finding out that VMware has been working on shifting VMware Workstation from proprietary code to building atop the upstream KVM code within the Linux kernel. Following the initial patches from last October, an updated patch series was sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list yesterday for working on this transition...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-Workstation-Linux-KVM-v2
QEMU 10.0 Released With True Multi-Queue Support, New Apple Graphics Devices
QEMU 10.0 was released today as the newest version of this emulator code that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...
Linux Being Patched For Buggy MWAIT Behavior On Intel Ice Lake Servers
The Linux kernel has seen safeguards for select prior Intel CPU cores due to bugs around the MONITOR/MWAIT implementation with the processors. MWAIT/MONITOR bugs was found to be the cause of annoying issues at boot for Lunar Lake laptops and also previously plagued Goldmont Atom cores. It also turns out that Ice Lake servers can be subject to similar MWAIT/MONITOR behavior...
Wine 10.6 Released With New Command Processor Lexer, 27 Bug Fixes
After missing its bi-weekly development release regiment this past Friday, Wine 10.6 was tagged on Sunday as the newest routine update to this open-source software that enables Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other platforms...
Sway 1.11-rc1 Released With Many New Features & New Wayland Protocols
Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library...
Intel Continues Exploring Energy Aware Scheduling For Hybrid CPUs Without SMT
While Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" SoCs with on-package memory has been reported to be a one-off design, besides the integrated memory it was also notable for being a hybrid core design while lacking Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support. The notion of hybrid P/E core CPUs without SMT looks like it will continue with Intel software engineers still exploring Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) around such layouts...
TurnkeyML 6.2 Released With AMD Ryzen AI NPU Improvements
Released at the end of 2023 was TurnkeyML as an open-source collaboration between ONNX and AMD developers. TurnkeyML has evolved into focusing on making it easy to use the most important tools within the ONNX ecosystem and their Lemonade SDK to deploy large language models on various devices/accelerators Out today is TurnkeyML 6.2 with a focus on delivering better AMD Ryzen AI NPU support...
Intel's Newest Linux Driver Being Worked On For The Kernel: iXD
Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-iXD-Driver-Patches
A Fresh Take On Virtual Swap Space Being Pursued For The Linux Kernel
A request for comments (RFC) patch series sent out this week for the Linux kernel is working on the notion of Virtual Swap Space support. The notion of Virtual Swap Space has been talked about for years and even going back to 2011 there's been efforts to redesign the kernel's swap cache along similar lines...
Running Linux 6.15 vs. 6.14 Performance With The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360
So far my testing this week of the Linux 6.15 kernel in its early, post-RC1 state has been going well. No major upsets, yet to uncover any significant performance regressions, and overall has been going smoothly with the many new features/changes in Linux 6.15...
CUPS 2.4.12 Released To End Out The CUPS 2.4 Print Server Series
After the CUPS lead developer left Apple and OpenPrinting taking up CUPS developer after Apple ceased development, CUPS 2.4 eventually materialized. CUPS 2.4 released in 2021 as the culmination of that work to restore the open-source development around this print server while today brings CUPS 2.4.12 for ending out the series and looking toward a future with CUPS 2.5...
Turbostat Utility Bumps 1024 CPU Core Limit To 8192 Cores After HPE Breaches It With 1152 Cores
On Sunday prior to releasing Linux 6.15-rc1, one of the last feature pulls was merging updates for the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree. The Turbostat tool provides CPU frequency and power statistics along with the ability to query temperatures and other CPU metrics on AMD and Intel processors...
PostgreSQL Turns To AVX-512 For CRC32 Computations: Up To 3x Faster
In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations...
Linux 6.15 Crypto Subsystem Delivers Faster AES-CTR For AMD Zen 5 & Other x86_64 CPUs
The cryptography subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 merge window are quite exciting with some optimizations for modern x86_64 Intel/AMD processors enticing us the most...
RISC-V With Linux 6.15 Adds Support For BFloat16 "BF16" Instructions
Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release...
Debian APT 3.0 Stable Released With New Package Solver & Refined Text UI
APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years...
Linux 6.15 USB/Thunderbolt Changes Include The New PS883X Driver
Along with the staging updates, driver core, and char/misc merges this week for the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman, he also sent out the USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 6.15 kernel...
NVIDIA Engineer Fixes Early Linux 6.15 Performance Regression Affecting AMD GPU Drivers
Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.15-Early-AMD-Regression
wlroots Merges Wayland Color Management / HDR Support
The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux...
Linux 6.15 PCI Brings New Drivers For Agilex PCIe Controller & AMD Multimedia DMA Bridge
All of the PCI subsystem feature updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. This includes some new drivers from AMD and Intel-Altera as well as various other PCI changes...