While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel...
Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox...
Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code...
When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS...
While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive...
Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning...
Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series...
Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems...
Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image...
Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today allow for inline tail support within the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). This inline tail support allows for saving space when storing many small files and with reduced I/O can lead to faster data copy times...
Power Profiles Daemon as the UPower project to make Linux laptop/system power profile handling via D-Bus is out with a new release. This is the Linux/open-source solution for exposing of power profiles to the Linux desktop and better managing the system state between power-saver / balanced / performance modes and other options...
Coreboot 24.08 debuted on Monday night as the newest feature release for this open-source system firmware project that allows replacing the proprietary BIOS/firmware on many different platforms. With Coreboot 24.08 comes more than 900 patches from 130+ developers in continuing to support new motherboards and making other improvements...
While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images...
Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning...
The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years...
One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced...
Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack used on both Windows and Linux platforms. Notable with the Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 is having initial Xe2 support...
Armbian 24.8 has been released as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that began with a focus on ARM boards but has also expanded to include RISC-V as well as traditional x86_64 Intel/AMD systems too...
With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%...
Like with last week's Linux 6.11-rc5 release, Linux 6.11-rc6 is out a half-day early due to Linus Torvalds' ongoing foreign travels. Linux 6.11-rc6 brings many more fixes to this kernel that will debut as stable in mid-September,..
August was a very busy month with the first AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processors going on sale, finally having AmpereOne 192-core Arm processors in the lab, Linux kernel development continuing to advance at a brisk pace, and a variety of other interesting software and hardware milestones. On Phoronix for the month were 213 original news articles authored by me as well as another 20 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles...
Arm engineer Mihail Atanassov proposed a set of "request for comments" patches this week for adding user submission support to the Panthor DRM driver that is used for handling newer Arm Mali graphics under Linux. This would allow user-space more easily to submit work directly to the GPU hardware without kernel intervention for better performance and management capabilities...
Intel has released a new version of their open-source Video Processing Library (VPL) for hardware-accelerated video encode / decode / processing across Intel graphics hardware...
The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser...
Jonas Adahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository...
Plasma 6.2 this week entered its soft feature freeze ahead of the Plasma 6.2 stable release in October. The focus now is on bug-fixing for Plasma 6.2 and at the moment they are at 301 bug reports, which is their lowest amount going back to 2015. The KDE developers hope over the next month to drop that to less than 200 bug reports...
Following the pull request from earlier this week that enables Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default for Linux 6.12, a final set of feature updates for the Intel kernel graphics driver have been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle...
Microsoft engineers continue contributing to the open-source Mesa graphics driver code for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) usage and other related use atop Windows 11. The latest contribution to Mesa is wiring up direct DPB management for the D3D12 video acceleration code...
While all of the focus recently when it comes to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver has been around getting Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics ready, there is an important last-minute fix that is also needed for ensuring Arrow Lake graphics support is ready for Linux users...
Longtime Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat has written an interesting blog post providing an analogy to types of developers compared to road builders and hotels...
The Wine project has released VKD3D 1.13 as the newest version of this open-source code for mapping Microsoft's Direct3D 12 API atop the Vulkan API for helping to accelerate Windows games and applications on Linux...
Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a "bcachefs-tools" package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust, it's become an unmaintainable mess for stable-minded distribution vendors. As such the bcachefs-tools package has now been orphaned by Debian...
Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS has been released as the first point release of the current Long Term Support series that began in April with the "Noble Numbat" debut...
Submitted today via DRM-Misc-Next to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window in mid-September is optional support for displaying a QR code within the DRM Panic handler infrastructure when a Linux kernel panic occurs...
Earlier this week I began with AmpereOne A192-32X benchmarks and will continue for the next several weeks in finally having hands-on with the 192-core AArch64 server processor using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD 2U server platform. In today's next phase of AmpereOne performance benchmarking is looking at how AmpereOne scales across 32, 64, 96, 128, 160, and 192 core counts plus seeing core-for-core at 128 cores how AmpereOne compares to the Ampere Altra Max M128-30 processor. Plus these AmpereOne benchmarks at varying core counts against the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon competition.
It's happening! The upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle will be enabling the Xe2 graphics in Lunar Lake and Battlemage out-of-the-box / by-default. The Xe2 support within the open-source "Xe" kernel graphics driver appears to be stable enough now for enabling the support by default for Lunar Lake and Battlemage hardware with the next kernel version. The patches have been submitted...
Following the AMDVLK 2024.Q3.1 driver release from earlier in the month, AMDVLK 2024.Q3.2 is now available as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...
With the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) and Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) introduced first with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, they can be a big performance win for some workloads but can be a pain to setup and with limited software support. It also turns out that since a security advisory issued earlier in the year, current Intel IAA and DSA accelerators aren't safe for use within virtual machines (VMs) and that issue doesn't appear to be resolved until Diamond Rapids and Granite Rapids D processors...
It's crazy that Gallium Nine is already a decade old for providing a Direct3D 9 (D3D9) state tracker implementation for Gallium3D hardware drivers. Gallium Nine was useful years ago for speeding up Direct3D 9 support when using Wine on Linux for Windows games/applications but it hasn't been well maintained in years with DXVK pretty much taking over for efficiently mapping Direct3D atop the Vulkan API. It's time to sunset Gallium Nine...
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