Phoronix
Linux's Multi-Grain Timestamps Short-Lived: Removed From The Kernel After A Few Weeks

One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel...

Phoronix
Intel's DAOS 2.4 Storage Engine Released

While Intel divested its storage business and Intel Optane was sadly discontinued, one of the interesting open-source software projects from its storage efforts has been DAOS, the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage engine. Version 2.4 of the DAOS software-defined object store designed for high-speed storage was released this past week...

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Mold 2.2 Linker Released With More Optimizations, BLAKE3 Crypto Hashing

Rui Ueyama published today a new version of Mold, the open-source high speed linker that has easily outpaced the common linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects. Mold 2.2 continues work on its performance quest, expanding its multiple CPU architectures supported, and other new work...

Phoronix
Linux 6.7 Will Allow More Efficient Use With Intel QAT Gen4 Hardware

With the Linux 6.7 kernel this winter there is a new feature coming to Intel's QuickAssist Technology (QAT) device driver that will allow more efficient use with QAT Gen4 hardware such as the latest-generation Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors...

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AMD Prepares PMF Linux Driver For "Smart PC Solutions Builder"

The AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) Linux driver is preparing to support a new but potentially controversial feature that's seen little public information so far: the Smart PC Solutions Builder...

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Linux 6.6-rc3 Released With MG Timestamps Removed

With roughly just about one month to go until the stable release, Linux 6.6-rc3 was released today as the newest test release of Linux 6.6...

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KDE Making It Easier To Find Or Offer "Sponsored Work"

If you are particularly annoyed by a bug or missing feature with the KDE desktop, there's a new and easier means of advertising your interest in sponsoring work to get a bug or feature addressed. Similarly for experienced KDE developers a more centralized means of finding sponsored work opportunities...

Phoronix
PipeWire 1.0 Planned For Release Later This Year

The PipeWire audio and video streams solution for the Linux desktop is planning its big version "1.0" release for later in the year...

Phoronix
Mesa 23.2 Will Try To Release This Week

The much-delayed Mesa 23.2 will try to make it out this week with Mesa 23.2-rc4 having been issued on Sunday...

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Dynamic Triple Buffering Patch Updated For GNOME 45

GNOME 45 released last week and while it has many interesting desktop improvements, a feature still not found upstream is the Canonical-led work on dynamic triple buffering for Mutter...

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Intel Continues GCC Compiler Preparations For AVX10 & APX

Since announcing the Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AVX10 back in July, Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been busy preparing the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchains for these major CPU extensions to be found with future Intel processors...

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The Downfall Mitigation Impact For Xeon E-2300 Series On Linux 6.5

Last month the Downfall CPU security vulnerability was disclosed that impacts various AVX/AVX-512 workloads. Now that there's been a few weeks for the Linux kernel code to settle around the mitigation and the latest Intel CPU microcode becoming more broadly available, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Downfall mitigation on affected AVX workloads.

Phoronix
Firefox 118 Available With Performance Improvements, Automated Translations

Ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday, Mozilla today uploaded the Firefox 118.0 release binaries as the latest monthly update for this cross-platform web browser...

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Linux 6.7 Adding New Feature To Btrfs For The Steam Deck

Queued up into the Btrfs file-system driver's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.7 cycle is the Temp-FSID (Same-FSID) feature that is being pursued for use by Valve's Steam Deck game console. The functionality is to overcome a limitation of allowing Btrfs to mount two different devices holding the same file-system image and therefore the same file-system ID...

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VirtIO VSOCK MSG_ZEROCOPY To Begin Landing For Linux 6.7: More Performance

The first of three parts for MSG_ZEROCOPY preparations for the VirtIO-Vsock driver have been queued into net-next ahead of planned introduction in the Linux 6.7 kernel as another means of achieving greater performance within virtual machines...

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Intel Has Another Series Optimizing Linux Performance With PCP High Auto-Tuning

Intel's open-source software engineers are known for many great performance optimizations to the Linux kernel. Over the years Intel has contributed countless performance optimizations to the kernel and related Linux components that have made significant improvements not only for Intel hardware but x86_64 as a whole and at times CPU architecture independent improvements. One of their newest performance optimizing patch series is around Per-CPU Pageset (PCP) high auto-tuning...

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Intel's Habana Labs Driver Quietly Drops References To The Greco AI Processor

Announced last year at the Intel Vision conference was the Habana Labs Gaudi2 and Greco AI hardware. Since then we've seen a lot of Linux kernel driver work happen for enabling the Gaudi2 second-generation training and inference AI processor while there hasn't been anything real in the way for Greco, which was the successor to the Goya AI processor. Now references to Habana Labs Greco are being removed from the driver...

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Qt 6.6 Nears Release With RC Offered Up For Testing

Qt 6.6 is nearing release for this open-source and cross-platform toolkit while out this morning is the release candidate...

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OCRmyPDF 15.0 Released For Optical Character Recognition Of PDF Files

A major update to OCRmyPDF is now available, the open-source project that can work on scanned PDFs and other PDF documents to add an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to files for allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted. OCRmyPDF makes it a breeze in dealing with scanned PDF text files and now with OCRmyPDF v15 is even better...

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Limited Support For The AMD Pensando Elba SoC Might Finally Land Upstream In Linux 6.7

For a year and a half now Pensando has been working on enabling their Elba SoC support for the mainline Linux kernel - a process that coincidentally began just days after AMD announced it was acquiring Pensando. Over the past 18 months the AMD-Pensando Elba SoC enablement work has now been through 16 rounds of code review but still isn't over the finish line yet but some of the initial enablement code might finally land with Linux 6.7...