Phoronix

Ahead of the planned stable release next month, the beta version of Plasma 6.3 is out today for testing this next iteration of the KDE desktop...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution known as Azure Linux is out with its 3.0.20250102 update today. One of the interesting changes in this release is adding new AMD driver package repositories for allowing Azure Linux users to fetch the latest official AMDGPU driver packages or alternatively the newest "preview" driver packages...

KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop...

The Intel PMT open-source software support has now been updated for Platform Monitoring Technology Telemetry with the new Battlemage discrete graphics cards...

Upstreamed to LLVM/Clang overnight is now targeting support for the SiFive P550 RISC-V core with the "-mcpu=sifive-p550" option...

After being in development the past year, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of GNOME 48 is support for the Wayland timing and queueing protocols...

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs...

One of the leading rare complaints over the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (and the more recently launched Raspberry Pi 500) is that it tops out at just 8GB of system memory... 8GB was enough years ago and still is if planning to use the Raspberry Pi for lightweight desktop and embedded scenarios and other situations where you don't need too much RAM for the four ARM cores, but for those wanting more, today the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is being introduced...

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their December 2024 development recap. The developers involved did a great job ending out 2024 with a lot of exciting improvements for this scratch-based open-source operating system...

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V...

Intel software engineers this week sent out two pull requests landing more of their final kernel graphics driver feature changes destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel...

A set of patches posted this week for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver is beginning to expose additional i2c buses that are used by some OEM/AIB partners for implementing RGB lighting controls and other extra functionality with Radeon graphics cards...

For those with an Intel Core Ultra system bearing the company's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), some nice driver enhancements are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

FEX 2501 is now available as the newest feature release to this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts...

KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl is out with a new blog post on his quest of providing optimal High Dynamic Range (HDR) display experience with the KDE desktop. The latest focus by Xaver has been on fixing the "night light" mode support under KDE Plasma on HDR displays...

Open3D v0.19 is out as the newest feature release to this open-source library for 3D data processing in C++ and Python. Open3D provides various 3D data structures, processing algorithms, 3D visualizations, physically based GPU rendering, and machine learning integration with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow to offer powerful 3D data processing capabilities...

It turns out the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" has a strict mandate that packages must be able to be built for the x86_64 CPU architecture. Software not supporting x86_64 like ARM-only software is not permitted for the common Arch Linux AUR repository...

While it's very rare in recent times for a new OpenGL extension -- especially one that is exciting -- given the continued great adoption of the modern Vulkan API, in 2025 we are looking at an interesting addition to OpenGL with cross-vendor mesh shading via a proposed GL_EXT_mesh_shader implementation...

AMD's GPUOpen team today released HIP RT 2.5 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP. This library in turn is used by the likes of the Blender 3D modeling software for ray-tracing acceleration on Radeon GPUs...

Following weeks of rumors, today at CES in Las Vegas as part of debuting other new wares, Lenovo introduced the Legion Go S handheld gaming console option that is officially licensed by Valve for SteamOS...

HipScript is a new open-source project that allows for compiling and running AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA code within web browsers by leveraging WebAssembly and WebGPU...

In time for the upcoming release of Mesa 25.0, Mesa's Lavapipe software Vulkan API implementation is now the latest driver exposing Vulkan 1.4 support...

Keith Packard is known for his X.Org/X11 work over the course of many years but alongside other software projects he also maintains Picolibc as a C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Recently he sent out a patch for adding Picolibc support to the GCC compiler...

For fans of the Budgie desktop environment that got its start out of the Solus Linux distribution, the Budgie 10.10 release expected later this quarter will be their first release that is Wayland-only...

A pull request submitted this week to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is introducing the notion of device memory "DMEM" to cgroup with the main intended use being to restrict device memory usage based on the cgroup hierarchy such as for graphics cards with their dedicated vRAM...

Originally proposed for the Linux kernel nearly one year ago was CBD as the CXL Block Device. Now up to its third revision, the Linux CBD patches are calming down and the performance gains are looking quite nice...

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release with Monday having brought the fifth and potentially final release candidate...

The latest from a rather active CES 2025 is NVIDIA announcing the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series line-up...

AMD's CES 2025 keynote was used to announce a slew of new products. They are just announcements today without any immediate availability or any hardware reviews to publish, but a look ahead for what is on the horizon for AMD in the consumer space in 2025.

In addition to the HDMI Forum announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification for release in the first half of this year, VESA also took to CES 2025 to announce their forthcoming DisplayPort 2.1b standard...

The HDMI Forum used CES for today announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification that will be available to HDMI 2.x adopters in the first half of the calendar year...

Following last year's launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, Qualcomm is using CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas for promoting the Snapdragon X Series for mini desktop form factor PCs. But the Linux support and performance out of these forthcoming Snapdragon X Platform mini PCs remain to be seen...

Mozilla has published the Firefox 134.0 release binaries today ahead of their official release tomorrow. This first Firefox update of 2025 brings a few new features to Linux users and those on other platforms...

NVIDIA compiler engineers have spent the past several months working on a proposed GCC option -flto-partition=locality for having the compiler optimize the code layout for locality between callees and callers as part of the link-time optimization (LTO) process. For some workloads NVIDIA is finding this -flto-partition=locality compiler option being of significant help for bettering the CPU performance...

Intel used the start of CES 2025 for announcing the newest Arrow Lake processors for the Core Ultra 200H and Core Utra 200HX mobile processors...

Along with other recent Linux kernel patches around atomic write support, a set of Device Mapper (DM) patches were posted today for implementing said functionality...

A discussion that originally started last summer has been reignited: whether it's time to retire GlusterFS within Fedora Linux. But following discussions in recent days, there may be a new packager willing to take over but it doesn't change the fact of declining upstream activity around GlusterFS...

Maxime Ripard of Red Hat today sent out the first set of "drm-misc-next" patches of 2025 for queuing into DRM-Next until the Linux 6.14 merge window opens in the coming weeks...

For the past several months Intel Linux software engineers have been working on Intel Touch Host Controller drivers as an IP block on the PCH for handling touchscreen, touchpad, and related touch input devices. On Sunday the fourth iteration of these driver patches were sent out as these new Intel open-source drivers near the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January...

For fans of the Xubuntu derivative of Ubuntu Linux, the upcoming Xubuntu 25.04 release will feature the Xfce 4.20 desktop...

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed...

This morning I rolled out upgraded forum software to improve the forum experience and also hopefully help the overall Phoronix.com site performance with the database server being hammered recently from the forums...

Loongson's LoongArch processors for the Chinese market have been primarily for desktop systems but it looks like their workstation/server ambitions may be growing with now contributing an Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for Loongson SoCs with ECC memory...

Hot off the recent Serpent OS Alpha release and talking up new features for 2025, this original Linux distribution led by open-source developer Ikey Doherty is now demonstrating its offline rollback support with integration around its package management system...

For Marvell's line of Octeon line of data processing units (DPUs) and baseband processors, it looks like a new DPU is on the way with the CN20K silicon seeing work on enabling Linux support...

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who continues persevering with the Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver for Mesa has an exciting late Christmas present on the way... He's been hacking on Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Rusticl that works across GPU vendor drivers/hardware...

There weren't too many changes this week for the GNOME project given the end of year holidays wrapping up and many taking time off. But This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes that did get made...

LLVM development has peaked in recent years at around 37k commits per year for this huge, innovative open-source compiler stack. It was another very exciting year for this leading open-source compiler stack...

After a short break over the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back with his "This Week in Plasma" series to highlight the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes made each week...