Phoronix

Distrobox is the open-source software making it easy to run any Linux distribution inside your terminal by leveraging Podman, Docker, or Lilipod for containerizing the Linux distribution of your choice. Distrobox works well with a range of Linux distros and has developed quite a following. Out now is Distrobox 1.7 with yet more improvements to this innovative software...

NetBSD 10.0-RC5 was released on Wednesday as what is hopefully the last release candidate...

Mesa 24.0 series release manager Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time bi-weekly point release for this set of open-source GPU user-space driver components. There are many fixes, new Intel ADL-N PCI IDs, and other backported updates for this latest stable release...

Wednesday's small Steam client beta update should fix a crash when starting the Steam client when no OpenGL drivers are found...

It's a big day today in the open-source NVIDIA Nouveau/NVK space... The Mesa NVK driver is now officially declared a Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation by the Khronos Group! In turn the NVK driver is no longer considered experimental and with Mesa 24.1 will build by default for x86/x86_64-based installations...

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed...

Besides the integrated RDNA3 graphics making the Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs interesting, making the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G a fun benchmarking target besides its sub-$200 price tag is having a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C performance and power efficiency when offlining various core combinations on the Ryzen 5 8500G desktop processor.

Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework...

Being worked on and off for several years has been FUSE read/write passthrough support for improving the performance of File-Systems in User-Space by avoiding the daemon overhead on a per-file basis where read/write operations are forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower file-system rather than the FUSE daemon. FUSE passthrough mode has shown to be a big performance win and it looks like it could be finally mainlined come Linux 6.9...

Upstreamed for Linux 6.8 is the experimental Xe kernel graphics driver that is a modern replacement to the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe kernel driver targets Tigerlake graphics and newer while it won't be until Lunar Lake / Xe2 when it aims to become the default driver for Intel iGPU/dGPU graphics. For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window are more feature changes and fixes to this new open-source Intel kernel graphics driver...

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within the Mesa codebase has merged support for the important VK_EXT_shader_object and VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extensions. Additionally, as part of supporting these new extensions, this introduces the code for a common Vulkan runtime to Mesa...

The Servo web engine project has put out a new blog post that outlines all of their accomplishments made during the course of February...

Today's the day! KDE MegaRelease 6 is out for shipping Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 apps...

Daniel Almeida with Collabora has posted a rewritten of the VP9 codec library code within the Linux kernel's Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) subsystem. In using Rust rather than the existing C code, this should yield better memory safety and better fend off potential issues within the existing code...

Continuing to bring-up the Wine Wayland driver for offering native Wayland support without X11/XWayland, Alexandros Frantzis opened the pull request today for enabling basic OpenGL support...

By default the AArch64 kernel on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions tend to default to a standard 4K page size but for newer AArch64 hardware especially in the server/HPC space, there can be great benefits to using a 64K page size. As it's been a while since I last ran any 64-bit ARM 4K vs. 64K kernel page size benchmarks, while having remote access to the NVIDIA GH200 I ran a fresh comparison for looking at the performance advantages to switching over to a 64K page size kernel. These new 64K kernel numbers are shown alongside the recent AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon CPU reference benchmark results for a look at how the 4K vs. 64K page size affects the overall computing landscape.

Ahead of this week's big KDE Plasma 6.0 release, the KWinFT project forked from the KDE KWin compositor code is re-branding as Theseus' Ship...

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the Libre-SoC project that for the past 5+ years has been wanting to build a libre/open-source SoC for graphics acceleration and other uses...

The Mold high performance linker has long been known for offering excellent performance over GNU Gold/ld and LLVM lld while some fresh benchmark numbers reinforce the competitive advantage that persists today for this open-source project...

With the Mesa 24.1-devel Git code as of this morning, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 for Vulkan Video accelerated decoding of AV1 video content...

The Linux kernel has supported the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" via the "intel_hfi" driver since 2022 for bettering supporting Core hybrid processors. The Intel HFI can be used for communicating performance and energy efficiency capabilities of individual CPU cores of the system. In turn the Linux kernel can leverage Intel HFI details for better task placement among the available CPU cores/threads. With a new patch series, the Intel HFI driver can "save tons of CPU cycles" by only enabling it when needed...

It looks like AMD will soon be announcing the ROCm 6.1 update to its open-source GPU compute stack...

The first release candidate of FreeBSD 13.3 is now available for testing. While FreeBSD 14 stable has been out now for months, FreeBSD 13.3 is the latest in the prior series for those continuing to rely on FreeBSD 13 in production...

Ubuntu/Canonical has for a while now promoted the prospects of Rust programming within the Linux kernel and one of their kernel engineers, Andrea Righi, wrote a Rust-written Linux scheduler with promising results that leverages eBPF for dynamically loading it at run-time. While Ubuntu isn't yet committing to using it as part of their distribution, appearing on the Ubuntu blog today was more praise for the work and even talking about the potential for a "micro-kernel design" in the future via leveraging Rust and eBPF...

KiCad 8.0 has been released as the latest major feature release for this open-source Electronics Design Automation (EDA) software suite. KiCad supports designing PCB layouts, provides a 3D viewer for inspecting PCBs, and other functionality...

Ant Group and Alibaba have proposed PVM, the Pagetable Virtual Machine, as a new virtualization framework built upon the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. PVM does not require hardware-assisted virtualization while working with KVM-enabled software like Kata Containers...

Last July AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card in China with a reduced Navi 31 GPU. Beginning tomorrow, 27 February, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is being made available worldwide. Today the review embargo expires on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for the worldwide scope and within the US will be priced around $549 USD.

Released last June was the SDDM 0.20 display manager with experimental Wayland support and other enhancements after being in development for three years. Out this morning is SDDM 0.21 as another step toward SDDM 1.0 with improved Wayland support and other enhancements to this Qt-tooled display manager...

Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olak after more than one decade working officially for AMD and years before that as an independent open-source contributor going back to the R300g days still has not run out of new performance optimizations to pursue. The most recent accomplishment for this leading Mesa contributor are some refinements to the OpenGL threading "glthread" code for lowering the memory footprint...

Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors...

When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver...

WayVNC 0.8 was released this weekend as the VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC attaches to wlroots-using compositors and creators virtual input devices and exposes the display via the RFB protocol for the lack of Wayland having any standardized VNC-type support for remote/network computing...

The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks...

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support...

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...

Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9...

Microsoft's in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution has routinely seen weekly-ish updates to this open-source code used within Azure, WSL, and other areas of the Redmond company. But it's been one month since the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 release... That changed Saturday night with a shiny new release...

GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input...

CachyOS 240224 was released today for this Arch Linux derived desktop distribution that focuses on being a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" with a variety of desktop options, employing LTO and other optimizations for packages, optional x86-64-v3 binaries, and other tuning to make for a speedy out-of-the-box Linux experience...

Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system...

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened...

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1...

In time for weekend Linux gamers, Valve and their CodeWeavers partners today rolled out their first public beta of Proton 9.0 as their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with ease under the Steam client...

Wine 9.3 is out this Friday as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux...

A request for comments patch series was posted today for FAMFS, a new special purpose file-system proposal out of Micron for dealing with Fabric-Attached Memory (FAM) devices such as will become more common within the Compute Express Link (CXL) server space...

While the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window has been over for several weeks now, due to a busy February of new hardware releases and lots of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking, I've been behind in writing up my Linux 6.8 feature recap. For those wanting a concise look at the many great changes coming with Linux 6.8 that will debut as stable in March, here's an overview of the interesting Linux 6.8 changes.

Intel's latest release of their Intel Extension for PyTorch "IPEX" now officially supports their consumer Arc A-Series Graphics hardware across Linux, Windows, and also WSL2...