Phoronix

For fans of OBS Studio as a popular cross-platform solution for gaming live-streamers and used for other desktop screen-casting purposes, OBS Studio 30.2 is now available as stable...

System76 continues working vigorously on COSMIC, their Rust-written Linux desktop environment being written for Pop!_OS and to see availability on other Linux distributions as well. They are finishing up last minute changes before putting the flag on a COSMIC alpha release...

It was just announced at the end of last year that Holly Million was named as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. After a little more than a half-year, this previous outsider to GNOME announced she will be stepping down from her post. A new interim executive director will be starting while the search begins for a permanent replacement...

This week AWS announced that Graviton4 went into GA with the new R8G instances after Amazon originally announced their Graviton4 ARM64 server processors last year as built atop Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. I eagerly fired up some benchmarks myself and I was surprised by the generational uplift compared to Graviton3. At the same vCPU counts, the new Graviton4 cores are roughly matching Intel Sapphire Rapids performance while being able to tango with the AMD EPYC "Genoa" and consistently showing terrific generational uplift.

Oliver Smith with Canonical has been communicating a lot in recent months around the great improvements planned for Ubuntu 24.10. Canonical engineers and the Ubuntu community have been working on many significant improvements for the desktop in Ubuntu 24.10. Today is a new blog post by Oliver to highlight some of the recent changes...

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" is now available as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) of this open-source and cross-platform mail client...

Over the past year there have been a lot of GTK4 graphics offload improvements including work on its Vulkan renderer. Another round of graphics offload improvements have been recently wrapped up for this open-source toolkit...

openSUSE's Aeon desktop operating system that brings automated maintenance and other features to be a platform that "just works" is preparing for what they describe as comprehensive full disk encryption...

Libavif 1.1 has arrived as the newest feature release to this library for implementing the AV1 Image File Format with image encode and decode capabilities...

Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted...

There have been ongoing reports from a variety of users and systems around high power use during GPU-accelerated video playback with current-generation AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" laptops. Fortunately, an optimization is coming to benefit Phoenix and forthcoming Strix Point laptops with noticeably lower power consumption during video playback...

One year ago Meta released IGL as the Intermediate Graphics Library as a cross-platform, low-level graphics interface built atop native graphics APIs like OpenGL, Vulkam, and Metal. This MIT-licensed library has seen its first tagged version in the form of IGL 1.0...

The Mold linker is already a high-speed alternative to the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Its performance is very impressive while those using it while carrying out debug builds have the ability to achieve an insane speed-up thanks to a new option...

Colin Percival who took over as the release engineering lead for FreeBSD last November has come up with two important changes for this BSD operating system's release engineering process...

Building off last month's release of XWayland 24.1 that brought explicit sync support, improved rootful, and other changes, the first point release has now been issued...

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language...

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!..

Updated AMD CPU microcode was published today and subsequently merged into linux-firmware.git for all Family 17h and Family 19h processors, spanning Zen 1 through Zen 4 models...

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is Intel's "Performance Limit Reasons" reporting for indicating why a processor may be downclocking...

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade...

Following their acquisition last year of open-source AI provider Nod.ai and other AI investments, AMD today announced they are acquiring Silo AI...

JetBrains announced this week that via their 2024.2 Early Access Program that IntelliJ-based IDEs will now offer experimental Wayland support...

DXVK 2.4 has been released for this Direct3D over Vulkan API implementation...

Over the years there have been various attempts at getting the open-source RADV Vulkan driver on Windows, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been recently hacking on it and achieving success for having this popular Radeon Vulkan API driver for Linux working under Windows...

Adding to the growing list of changes that is making September's GNOME 47 desktop release quite a delight, the Mutter compositor has merged another great feature...

Basemark last week released GPUScore: Breaking Limit as a "groundbreaking cross-platform ray-tracing benchmark" that is scalable from mobile to desktops. They self-describe Breaking Limit as "the world's first true cross-platform benchmark for ray tracing." Given that and the benchmark meeting my benchmarking criteria, I've been trying it out on various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Linux.

AMD's GPUOpen group this morning released the FidelityFX SDK 1.1 version that incorporates FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) as the newest version of their game upscaling tech. Plus it introduces new components in the form of the Breadcrumbs Library and Brixelizer...

Merged for Mesa 24.2 is a massive set of patches providing a new platform abstraction for NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. With this new platform abstraction it begins to open the door toward running the NVK driver on alternative kernel (DRM) drivers...

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed...

With CentOS Stream 10 beginning to take shape as the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the Hyperscale Special Interest Group (SIG) has begun crafting CentOS Stream Hyperscale 10...

For those using an Apple Magic Keyboard with a T2-secured Mac, the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel will enable working keyboard backlight support...

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours...

While Loongson's LoongArch processors have been supported under Linux from the start, there remain some missing/late elements still being pursued by Loongson engineers for better upstream support. One of the areas being worked on recently is a proper CPUFreq driver for Loongson 3 series processors for CPU frequency scaling for better performance and power management...

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed...

With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was a fundamental change made by Canonical to enable frame pointers by default for their packages in the name of improving the debugging and profiling experience. This has been as part of a broader push by Canonical to focus more on Ubuntu Linux performance and ensuring the needs of developers are met. With Ubuntu 24.10, more of the packages will have frame pointer support enabled...

In preparation for upcoming CPU launches I have been spending the past month re-testing the various Intel Core and AMD Ryzen current generation processors on the very latest Linux software stack and latest system BIOS along with some updated and new benchmarks. For those wanting a fresh look at how the current AMD Ryzen 7000 and 8000 series processors are competing with 14th Gen Intel Core (Raptor Lake Refresh) processors, this article is for you with 18 processors and 443 benchmarks being carried out while using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upgrading to the Linux 6.10 development kernel.

Canonical today released LXD 6.1 as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused solution for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers...

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line...

Back in February I wrote about Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers working on a new adaptive sharpening filter capability to be found with upcoming Xe2 graphics starting with Lunar Lake. This new adaptive sharpening filter has minimal power and performance impact and at least according to the driver engineers is working out rather well. Besides the Intel Xe kernel driver support around enabling this adaptive sharpening filter, Intel has also been readying the rest of the Linux desktop stack for exposing this capability...

For those with an ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI motherboard or thinking of getting one for this high-end AMD Ryzen 7000 series platform, the Linux support is taking another small step forward...

Both the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers today saw support for Intel's Branch Hint extension merged today for this feature of Redwood Cove P cores as found with current generation Meteor Lake processors as well as upcoming Intel Granite Rapids server processors...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.10-rc7 as the latest weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.10 kernel...

GDB 15.1 was released on Sunday as the first version in the GNU Debugger 15 branch for this widely-used, open-source debugging solution...

Direct3D 8 support by way of the D8VK project has now been merged into DXVK, the widely relied upon open-source software for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 22 aims for release this month after a busier than usual period of bug fixing...

Upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel last year was HID BPF as a means of more easily shipping new drivers and in particular quirks/workarounds for different HID devices. This allows for some nice continued innovations around (e)BPF within the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.11 there is yet more HID BPF capabilities to be upstreamed as well as new drivers...

When it comes to (non-Apple) ARM laptops all the excitement these days is around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC. But for those that happen to have a 5+ year old Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS laptop or come across one in a bargain bin, the Linux kernel is seeing improved support for this older ARM laptop powered by an aging Snadragon 850 SoC...

The Linux kernel's block subsystem for storage is poised to introduce support for atomic writes with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window...

The latest Linux kernel enablement work for upcoming Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors is perf subsystem support...

This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July...