Michael Larabel

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions.

Following discussions among compiler developers and other stakeholders, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is preparing to add a "-fhardened" compiler option that will enable various hardening features aimed at increasing the security/robustness of the generated binaries.

Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its "experimental" marking.

A few days ago Bcachefs was proposed for inclusion to Linux 6.6 after it failed to be pulled for the prior Linux 6.5 kernel cycle. Since then we've been waiting to see what action Linus Torvalds would take with including Bcachefs... He's finally commented on it today but remains to be seen if it will land for this kernel release.

While Bcachefs was not merged for the Linux 6.6 cycle with one of the concerns raised by Linus Torvalds being that it hadn't been vetted via the "linux-next" staging area, that process has now begun to raise hopes of potentially seeing the new file-system driver introduced for Linux 6.7.

Among the many changes to land during this first week of the Linux 6.6 cycle were the x86 CPU microcode loader updates that now unconditionally makes that support part of the x86/x86_64 kernel builds.

It turns out that Ubuntu Linux installations of Ubuntu 23.04, 22.04.3 LTS, and installs done since April 2023 that accepted the Snap version update haven't been following Ubuntu's own recommended security best practices for their security pocket configuration for packages. A new Subiquity release was issued today to fix this problem while those on affected Ubuntu installs are recommended to manually edit their /etc/apt/sources.list file.

In time for the weekend gamers, SteamOS 3.5 has just rolled out into Valve's preview channel for the Steam Deck. Those switching over to the "Preview" mode from the System Update Channel setting can begin to enjoy this huge feature update for the Arch Linux based SteamOS.

As part of the effort for enabling UEFI support with ReactOS, an open-source operating system re-implementing binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows, a development build of ReactOS is up and running on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console.

Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11.

In addition to all the open-source kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.6, merged this afternoon ahead of the Linux 6.6-rc1 tagging is merging of the DRM continuous integration (CI) code to hopefully lead to better testing of DRM subsystem/driver changes.

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

With the EXT4 file-system updates for Linux 6.6 there is mostly some code clean-ups and other bug fixing. But one change in particular stands out for its performance impact.

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.

In addition to the EEVDF scheduler replacing the CFS code in Linux 6.6, another fundamental and interesting change with Linux 6.6 is on the workqueue (WQ) side with a rework that can benefit systems with multiple L3 caches like modern AMD chiplet-based systems.

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support.

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.

With the Linux 6.6 merge window the cgroup changes brought one change worth mentioning.

Just as anticipated, the Linux 6.5 kernel has landed in the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic archive as the default kernel powering this next Ubuntu distribution release due out in October.

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.

The past two years AMD's AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve's Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware.