Phoronix

AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements...

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions...

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory...

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion...

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins...

Framework Computer Inc announced today that they have been working with DeepComputing on a partner-developed RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13...

Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February...

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey...

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak has shown no signs of hitting the end of the road for optimizing OpenGL support within the Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack. More than one decade since joining AMD and more than a decade and a half of being involved with Mesa since beginning as a student developer, Marek still isn't slowing down with his performance optimizations and new features to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers...

A set of patches for the Linux kernel's Intel P-State driver aim to ensure Intel Xeon servers can hit their highest clock frequencies following changes in the server's performance profile. It turns out some special handling is needed to update the highest frequencies of a CPU after boot to ensure the performance profile is properly reflected...

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41...

A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems...

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too...

With the release of Fedora 41 in October, this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution is hoping to have all the software bits aligned that its AMD SEV-SNP virtualization stack will be all squared away for this latest iteration of Secure Encrypted Virtualization...

Intel today released OpenVINO 2024.2, the newest version of its open-source AI toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning (A) inference models across a range of AI frameworks and broad hardware types...

As a planned change for Fedora 41, Red Hat engineers are working on upstream GNOME Software better supporting the NVIDIA proprietary driver installation by allowing the installation to work gracefully with UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems...

After last week looking at how FreeBSD 14.1 has improved performance over FreeBSD 14.0, here is an expanded cross-OS comparison now looking at how the new FreeBSD 14.1 stable release compares to the recently released NetBSD 10.0, the current DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release, and then CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for some Linux comparison data points.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making sizable investments into various Linux desktop projects, the Rust-based Coreutils implementation, libmicrohttpd, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and other prominent open-source software that could benefit from greater financial resources. Today they have announced they have opened up for a new round of applications for those open-source projects seeking funding from this German government initiative...

Intel's Open Image Denoise open-source software that is a denoising library used by Blender and other applications is out with a new feature release as it prepares for the integrated graphics of upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors as well as nearing the launch of Xe2 / Battlemage discrete graphics...

Within the every increasingly complex world of CPU security mitigations, Intel engineers have submitted Linux kernel patches to begin taking into account the CPU core "hybrid" topology when determining relevant CPU security vulnerabilities and in turn the mitigations to apply...

Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn's Fedora 41 release...

NumPy 2.0 was released on Sunday that's been in the making for the past year and their first major release since 2006. While it comes with API/ABI breakage, NumPy 2.0 delivers new features and performance improvements...

While at the start of 2023 was talk among kernel developers for orphaning the JFS file-system at a time that developers began the processes toward removing the ReiserFS file-system driver, the Journaled File-System so far remains within the mainline kernel and not yet officially orphaned...

Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel set aside some time this Father's Day to release Linux 6.10-rc4...

IceWM 3.6 is out today as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager...

After being talked about for years of DRM panic handling and coming with a "Blue Screen of Death" solution for DRM/KMS drivers, Linux 6.10 is introducing a new DRM panic handler infrastructure for being able to display a message when a panic occurs. This is especially important for those building a kernel without VT/FBCON support where otherwise viewing the kernel panic message isn't otherwise easily available...

For months Broadcom has been working on the VMware Hypercall API for the Linux kernel. This "vmware_hyperscall" is a new family of functions for use by the VMware guest code and virtual device drivers in an architecture-independent manner...

Christian Schaller of Red Hat shared an update on Friday around the ongoing enhancements to Fedora Workstation. Given the current industry trends, ongoing Fedora Workstation development is seeing a lot of attention around... AI, AI, AI...

For years there has been the RKVDEC Linux media driver to provide accelerated video decoding on Rockchip SoCs. Being worked on now is RKVDEC2 for providing video decoding on the newer Rockchip SoCs...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.11 as that newest bi-weekly development release, Wine Staging 9.11 has been released with some 428 patches re-based atop this latest upstream Wine code...

A Linux power management change merged on Friday aims to help ensure AMD Ryzen systems with NVMe solid-state drive storage will work properly when resuming from suspend...

GNOME's longtime document viewer, Evince, was recently forked as GNOME Papers and saw its first release a few weeks back. This new GNOME document viewer has been ported from GTK3 to GTK4 and also brings an improved user interface and other refinements...

Apple compiler engineers have contributed Apple M4 CPU support to the upstream LLVM/Clang compiler via the new -mcpu=apple-m4 target. Interestingly the Apple M4 is exposed as an ARMv8.7 derived design...

KDE Plasma 6.1 is preparing for release next week on 18 June. KDE developers this week have thus been very busy with last minute finishing touches to this updated desktop while also already beginning feature work on Plasma 6.2...

Wine 9.11 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms. With Wine 9.11 we are now roughly at the half-way point before Wine's typical feature freeze and release candidate start that typically begins around early December and this cycle will lead up to the Wine 10.0 stable release in early 2025...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has been working with various KDE designers and developers to establish a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)...

LibreOffice 24.8 is now available in beta form for those wanting to test this open-source, cross-platform office suite alternative to the likes of Microsoft Office...

The main set of drm-intel-gt-next patches aiming for the Linux 6.11 kernel were submitted this week to DRM-Next. Most notable with this feature update for the next kernel version is enabling a new hardware replay feature for better reproducing GPU hangs...

Last month some of the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop plans were laid out such as NVIDIA Wayland by default, a new welcome wizard, and more. Canonical's Oliver Smith has posted an update today around some of the ongoing Ubuntu 24.10 desktop enhancements...

Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver "ANV" has reduced the driver start-up time by about half...

Kernel developer and consultant Johan Hovold spent the last two years working on improving ARM Linux laptop support with a particular focus on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s powered Qualcomm SoC. Arm funded this Linaro effort and as a result the ThinkPad X13s enjoys pleasant upstream kernel support now. This Arm Linux laptop project has now concluded but sets a nice base for further ARM Linux laptop improvements moving forward...

While for years there has been the Habana Labs AI accelerator driver within the mainline Linux kernel, this "accel" driver has been focused on just supporting training/inference across their products. Now being worked on for the mainline Linux kernel are upstreaming the Habana Labs network drivers that can be used for scaling out the AI workloads across multiple systems...

Being merged to Mesa 24.2 this week is a set of 12 patches that have been four months in the making for supporting the OpenGL/EGL fixed-rate compression extensions...

The first beta release of the Qt 6.8 toolkit is now available for testing with many new features...

For those interested in running Linux on the Ayaneo Kun handheld gaming console alternative to Valve's Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, among others, a display quirk has been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.10-rc4 release this weekend to fix the display handling...

Here's how an exciting message from a NVIDIA engineer that just hit the mailing list begins: "NVIDIA has been exploring ways to better support the effort for an upstream kernel mode driver for GPUs that are capable of running GSP-RM firmware, since the introduction to Nova."..

Fwupd 1.9.21 is now available for this open-source software for facilitating system firmware and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux and other platforms...

The past few months open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso has been developing an open-source accelerator driver for Rockchip's NPU. The experimental driver has shown the open-source code can compete with Rockchip's proprietary driver and Vizoso has been working to develop an upstream-minded driver for a kernel driver living within the "accel" subsystem and then leveraging Mesa's Teflon for the user-space component. Yesterday the "Rocket" accel kernel driver was posted for the Rockchip NPU...