Phoronix

In addition to exploring low-latency changes for the "generic" kernel image, frame pointers by default, and possible x86-64-v3 optimizations, another area being invested into feature work for this next long-term support release is on the desktop provisioning side. Building off work of their new Ubuntu desktop installer and unifying the installation tech that has already been used by Ubuntu Server, Canonical is hoping for a nice desktop provisioning experience in facilitating automated installations, managed desktop setups within enterprises, and OEM/ODM deployments...

The AMD ROCm Debugger "ROCgdb" is maintained as a fork of the GNU Debugger (GDB) with support added for the heterogeneous debugging of the ROCm compute platform. ROCgdb works well and is distributed as part of the ROCM stack. The good news is that AMD is also working on getting this AMDGPU/ROCm debug support added into the upstream GDB debugger...

FreeBSD 14 has been out as stable since last November, but for those still on the FreeBSD 13 stable series, FreeBSD 13.3 beta was released this weekend ahead of its planned stable release in March...

On newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops (2024+ models) there is a new key combination appearing to make it easy to switch between ACPI Platform Profiles for toggling your power/performance preference of the system. With the Linux 6.9 kernel coming in a few months this key will now work under Linux too...

The latest all-in-one liquid cooler receiving a Linux driver to monitor pump speeds and coolant temperatures as well as managing radiator fan speeds under Linux is the ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360...

Intel's hybrid core handling for modern Intel Core CPUs with a mix of P and E cores has largely been in good shape under Linux for a while. Intel Thread Director support has come along with various Linux kernel improvements to better handle task placement between the P and E cores. One area seeing new work now though is for virtual machines (VMs) running on Intel hybrid systems with a new Linux kernel patch series working on Thread Director Virtualization...

In case you missed it debuting last week was Niri v0.1 as a new, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the GNOME extension PaperWM. Out today is a follow-on release with more fixes and a few additional features for this new Wayland compositor...

KDE Plasma 6.0 is due to be released at the end of this month! KDE Megarelease 6 RC2 released this week in facilitating more testing ahead of this big KDE desktop milestone and there's been no let-up in the amount of bug fixes and last minute work being prepped for this milestone...

Being merged today as part of the input subsystem "fixes" for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is supporting the controllers of the Lenovo Legion Go handheld game console...

Earlier this week I posted a 35-way Linux graphics card comparison featuring the new NVIDIA RTX 40 SUPER graphics cards and other recent AMD and NVIDIA hardware I had available while using the latest Linux drivers. Intel Arc Graphics desktop graphics cards weren't part of that comparison for simply running out of time prior to the RTX 4080 SUPER embargo lift to facilitate that re-testing. But for those interested, here is a fresh look at the Intel Arc Graphics A580 / A750 / A770 Linux performance against those NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

Debian Experimental has begun its package rebuilds for its 64-bit time_t transition for ensuring 32-bit architectures running Debian Trixie will be able to operate past the Year 2038...

The Rust-based Redox OS open-source project has published a new blog post outlining some of their recent accomplishments as well as a look ahead to other technical adventures planned for this year...

Intel's open-source oneAPI components continue to not only embrace Intel's diverse range of CPUs / GPUs / accelerators but continues to better support competing platforms too. Today's Open Image Denoise release candidate brings more for Apple hardware, AArch64 processors, and NVIDIA CUDA...

Following yesterday's release of VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 in Vulkan 1.3.277 for AV1 video decoding, a Mesa merge request has already been opened for adding the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 extension to the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver...

Following the release of OBS Studio 30.0 last November, OBS Studio 30.1 Beta 1 was released today as what will be the next feature release for this open-source software that is popular with livestreamers and other game streaming / desktop recording purposes...

One of the new features for Linux 6.8 that was merged late was enabling the -Wstringop-overflow compiler option to warn about possible buffer overflows in cases where the compiler can detect such possible overflows at compile-time. While it's nice in theory, issues on GCC has led Linus Torvalds to disabling this compiler option as of now Linux 6.8...

While all major feature development for the Simple DirectMedia Layer "SDL" is currently focused on SDL 3.0 for this library commonly used by cross-platform games for various hardware/software abstractions, SDL 2.30 released on Thursday as a new point release in the SDL2 series...

With the start of a new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. For January 2024, the reported Steam on Linux marketshare continued falling just short of the 2% threshold...

Introduced in April 2021 was the initial Vulkan Video support for a new video encode/decode API built around Vulkan. That initial Vulkan Video support was catered to H.264 and H.265 while finally with today's Vulkan 1.3.277 release there is a new extension introduced for AV1 video decoding...

GNU libmicrohttpd version 1.0.0 is out today as the first major release of this C library implementing an easy-to-run HTTP web server that is embed-friendly for use by other applications...

More of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) support for memory encrypted VMs is set to make it upstream for the Linux 6.9 kernel coming out toward the middle of the year...

This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on some new features coming for Fedora 40 this April...

Webcameras on newer Intel laptops have been challenging for Linux use without resorting to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space components, but that's been thankfully changing with progress being made on an open-source stack. There's still proprietary firmware necessary for enabling the IPU6 image processing unit, but at least that too is now in linux-firmware.git for easy distribution and packaging by Linux distributions...

Since last August AMD Linux engineers have been working on P-State Preferred Core support for the "amd_pstate" driver so that this functionality can be leveraged under Linux for improved task placement...

January was a busy month with a number of notable hardware launches from the Framework 16 laptop to the new AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs to the new System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series. There were 268 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles on Phoronix during the last month. With all that daily original content, here's a look back at the most popular news and reviews from January...

Last week CodeWeavers engineer Elizabeth Figura posted the initial patches for a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver for Linux for exposing /dev/ntsync for exposing some synchronization primitives available under Windows directly within the Linux kernel. This has the potential of sharply speeding up some Windows games and applications running under Wine on Linux or the likes of Valve's Steam Play (Proton). This week a second iteration of the patches were posted...

AMD on Wednesday evening released ROCm 6.0.2 as the newest point release to their open-source compute stack...

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers...

In addition to this week's release of GNU Binutils 2.42, ending out January is the release of the GNU C Library 2.39. This C library "libc" update comes with several new features, security fixes, and other enhancements...

You may recall from a few months back that the "open-source Windows" project ReactOS was going to be working on improving its GUI setup/installation. Progress is indeed being made there as shared in the latest ReactOS blog entry around further enhancing its GUI installer as an alternative to the text-mode setup...

Back in November 2022 AMD announced Brotli-G for GPU-accelerated Brotli compression. Brotli has proven very worthwhile for compressing web assets and other material while AMD's Brotli-G modifies the bitstream format to be more optimal for handling by GPUs rather than just relying on CPU (de)compression. Today Brotli-G 1.0 was finally released...

Here's a fresh look at the AMD Radeon versus NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics/gaming performance across a variety of workloads as well as our first look at the GeForce RTX 4070 series and RTX 4080 SUPER performance. With recently receiving the rest of the GeForce RTX 40 series line-up currently released, we're now able to share a comprehensive look at how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series versus AMD Radeon RX 7000 series performance is under Linux.

The newest frontier by the Linux Foundation is getting involved with coming up with a formal file format specification for Lottie, the vector graphics animation format based on JSON...

Posted at the start of 2022 was a set of 2.3k patches dubbed "fast kernel headers" to massively speed-up build times for compiling the kernel and to address dependency hell situations. While it was quick to iterate at first and some bits got upstreamed, it's been months since hearing anything new on the fast kernel headers topic. But today a new patch series was posted that's restarting the effort in working towards massively speeding up kernel build times...

Releasing at the end of February is the much anticipated Plasma 6.0 desktop where the Wayland session is the default. Plasma 6.0 will be joined by KDE Frameworks 6.0 and the Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps too. Out today for closing out January is the second release candidate of these packages...

LibreOffice 24.2 is now available as the latest major update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office...

Merged overnight for Linux 6.8 is enhancing the EROFS read-only open-source file-system to perform better in low-memory scenarios. Not just better, but significantly better performance...

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for improved thermal/power/performance behavior under Linux works for Zen 2 and newer systems where the platform exposes ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) support. There's been a caveat though of the "amd_pstate" driver having issues for the Zen2-based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. With a newly-published set of patches, that issue should be resolved...

The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux...

Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation...

While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux...

AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP...

For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems...

The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment...

For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors...

ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero...

As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed...

Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack...

It looks like the Red Hat change restricting access to RHEL sources that was announced last year is having the unintended consequence of causing some headaches for CentOS special interest group (SIG) projects...