Phoronix

Besides its desktop-level customizations, further differentiating System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution from its Ubuntu LTS package base is the tendency to roll down newer versions of the upstream Linux kernel once validated across System76's portfolio of laptops and desktops. The latest on that front is Pop!_OS now shipping with the fresh Linux 6.8 stable series...

Following several days of discussions from both sides of the table over whether SDL 3.0 should revert its Wayland over X11 preference in light of some aspects of the Wayland ecosystem support not being in good shape, for now at least SDL 3.0 is sticking to the Wayland support by default. It may be revisited though closer to release to see how the upstream support is for users of this hardware/software abstraction library widely used by cross-platform games...

Ubuntu maker Canonical has spent the past several months exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 based images for leveraging the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level capabilities to target the level embracing AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other instructions supported largely since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator era processors. As shown in benchmarks Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds can deliver better performance for the AMD/Intel systems of the past number of years. Canonical's latest foray in this area is offering up Microsoft Azure images that are tailored for x86-64-v3...

Blender has long enjoyed faster CPU rendering under Linux compared to using Microsoft Windows. Across many different processors over the years consistently we see faster Linux CPU render performance than under Windows, though that's typically the case for most renderers. With yesterday's release of Blender 4.1, there is even faster Linux CPU render speeds. Here are some initial Blender 4.0 vs. 4.1 benchmarks...

Red Hat has made the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Beta available to their customers this week for those wanting to test the next iteration of RHEL9...

What a time we live in where Microsoft not only continues contributing significantly to the Linux kernel but doing so to further flesh out the design of the Linux kernel's Rust programming language support. A previously unimaginable combination of Microsoft, the Rust programming language, and the Linux kernel...

The Intel open-source engineers working on the modern Xe DRM kernel graphics driver have begun looking at Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support for cross-device and cross-driver scenarios as the latest exciting feature work for this still-experimental driver...

TornadoVM is the OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that opens up the Java programming language to heterogeneous hardware support by allowing the easy targeting of Java code to TornadoVM targets including OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V -- in addition to CPUs. With the SPIR-V and OpenCL support in turn this means Java can run not only on GPUs but also some FPGAs and other devices...

Meta's Yann Collet just released Zstd 1.5.6 as the newest version of this Zstandard compression implementation. This release is driven in part by Google Chrome 123 adding support for Zstd encoding for web traffic. Chrome now allows Zstandard (zstd) for the content-encoding to speed-up page load speeds and bandwidth savings...

Blender 4.1 is officially out today as the newest version of this wildly popular, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

With the SDL library that's widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par...

The beta release of Fedora 40 is now available for testing ahead of the planned official release next month...

While Linux 6.9 brings many great changes and new features / hardware support, on the deprecation side it's deprecating the classic EXT2 file-system driver...

AMD today released its third and last open-source Vulkan driver update of the quarter...

Intel has sent out driver patches today for adding two additional PCI IDs to the DG2/Alchemist family for their Xe and i915 Linux kernel graphics drivers...

Back in Linux 6.6 the Shadow Stack support was finally merged as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). This years-in-the-making effort allows for better defending against ROP attacks for newer generations of Intel processors. For Linux 6.10, Shadow Stack support is being extended to x32...

Intel engineers that maintain the common VA-API library "libva" today released version 2.21 with several fixes and additions for this Video Acceleration API support...

The open-source Panthor DRM driver for supporting newer Arm Mali GPUs was queued in drm-misc-next at the start of March ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window. It ultimately though didn't see a drm-misc-next pull to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window and thus being held off until the Linux 6.10 cycle. This week though that drm-misc-next submission to DRM-Next took place as that driver and other changes begin queuing for Linux 6.10...

Now that Linux 6.9-rc1 was released on Sunday to mark the end of the merge window, here is a look at all of the new features that have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle.

Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases have been support for 10 years of updates by Canonical while now that has been extended to 12 years but only for Ubuntu Pro customers going for their legacy support add-on. This 12 year support is extended retroactively going back to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS...

The latest upstream development code for the Inkscape vector graphics program has transitioned to using the GTK4 toolkit...

The Linux 6.9 kernel will be able to boot systems with large amounts of memory -- and in particular making use of HugeTLB pages -- much faster than with previous kernels, netting a noticeable reduction in boot times...

AMD open-source Linux driver patches posted last summer enabled the new "VPE" IP block as a general purpose copy engine for future AMD GPUs. This VPE block might premiere in the upcoming AMD RDNA3.5 refresh (RDNA3+) integrated graphics but in any event AMD is already working on the incrementally improved VPE 1.1 IP with that now being supported by the Mesa 24.1 RadeonSI driver code...

It was just last week that Tiny Corp put their AMD Radeon graphics powered compute boxes "on hold" after being frustrated with the lack of select firmware source code and ultimately hitting various bugs. This wasn't the first time they had put their AMD Radeon graphics plans on-hold or dismissed it outright. With the start of the new week now comes plans to re-introduce an AMD Radeon graphics option for their compute boxes alongside their recently announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 compute rigs...

Intel today published a new version of its NPU Linux driver user-space components that goes along with their iVPU accelerator kernel driver for enabling the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their latest Meteor Lake systems...

Since last year Red Hat engineers have been developing xwayland-run and wlheadless-run for spawning X11 clients within its own dedicated XWayland rootful instance and for running a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors, respectively. The intent is on improving the Wayland headless experience as well as being able to get classic X11 sessions up and running via rootful XWayland. Out today is the XWayland-Run v0.0.3 release...

While most Linux distributions have long since moved on from SysVinit in favor of systemd for init duties, this weekend SysVinit 3.09 was released for any legacy users and holdouts still enjoying the System V-init style experience...

Linus Torvalds just released the first release candidate for Linux 6.9 that now marks the formal end of the two-week merge window...

Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes for Linux 6.9 continue to enhance the capabilities of the open-source Linux virtualization software stack...

Out this weekend is a new version of uutils' Coreutils 0.0.25 as the Rust-written drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils for common utilities found on Linux platforms and other systems...

The speakup driver that's long existed within the Linux kernel is a speech synthesizer that can interface with various synthesizer hardware and from user-space software can interface with /dev/synth for submitting data to the synthesizer. With Linux 6.9 the speakup driver is seeing two useful improvements...

Linux 6.8 dropped the SLAB allocator after its deprecation in v6.5 and now just leaving SLUB for all allocation duties. For Linux 6.9 there is continued cleaning from that SLAB removal as well as making more SLUB improvements...

With security concerns at all-time highs in the industry, Linux 6.9 is seeing yet more work to beef up its security hardening with various additional safety checks and other compile-time defenses for ensuring security best practices...

The IO_uring changes were merged early during the nearly-over Linux 6.9 merge window. This round brought yet a few more features to this wonderful and innovative kernel feature...

Workqueues are commonly used within the Linux kernel for asynchronous process execution contexts. With Linux 6.9 the workqueue (WQ) code has seen "significant and invasive" changes...

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes...

The DIRT 5 racing game was one of the titles that hadn't worked on Intel graphics under Linux due to the sparse memory support for the ANV Vulkan driver. But with sparse support now enabled, the game was crashing at launch. But now a workaround is in place to allow Intel's Mesa 24.1 Vulkan driver to work with DIRT 5...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls...

So far when it comes to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) display drivers for Linux, there are Rust efforts underway for the Apple Silicon kernel graphics driver with the Asahi Linux project as well as the new Nova effort for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver from Red Hat. Also now out from Red Hat is posting the Rust bindings for KMS to review plus porting the existing Virtual KMS driver over to Rust as the "RVKMS" driver...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy fixing a variety of regressions -- including some crashes -- with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop stack. Plasma 6.0.3 will ship next week with yet more fixes while some feature work toward Plasma 6.1 is also underway...

Wine 9.5 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements...

The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel ahead of the v6.9-rc1 release this Sunday...

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics...

Loongson continues enabling more kernel functionality for their LoongArch processor port for the upstream Linux kernel. With Linux 6.9 they sent out today a set of patches enabling more features for this Chinese CPU architecture...

The latest LibreOffice drawing code has enabled support for making use of multi-threaded 3D rendering...

Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use...

BOLT that was upstreamed into LLVM in 2022 by Facebook/Meta allows for optimizing the layout of binaries as a post-linking step to yield increased performance. BOLT like Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) first requires the profiling step to generate perf recordings to feedback in for the optimization process, but the gains can be significant...

AMD on Thursday published AOMP 19.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler focused on delivering the latest OpenMP device offloading support for their Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators...