Linux 6.3 - The Hardware Noise Tool

FFmpeg gets new superpowers, Plasma’s switch to Qt6 gets official; what you need to know. Plus we round up the top features coming to Linux 6.3.

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Links:

• Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
• FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
• FOSDEM 2023 - Dual presentation: FFmpeg 6 and VLC.js
• Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
• Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with interrupts disabled. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
• EXT4 Getting Direct I/O Performance Improvements With 6.3 — Improved performance for ext4
• Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups — Some of the performance work is quite juicy, as outlined in today's pull request.
• Btrfs updates for 6.3 - David Sterba
• Linux 6.3 Scheduler Updates Bring Fixes & Minor Optimizations
• RISC-V With Linux 6.3 Lands Optimized String Functions Via Zbb Extension — RISC-V with Linux 6.3 has improved its extension detection and alternative patching infrastructure for dealing with non spec compliant extensions.