Phoronix

The Khronos Group today announced their Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone as a specification for their latest API features and meeting the needs of 2024 graphics processors and other hardware. Vulkan Roadmap 2024 builds upon Vulkan 1.3 and the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 specifications to deliver next-generation capabilities...

GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software...

In addition to OBS adding AV1 VA-API support, some more good Linux video acceleration news this week is Valve enabling VA-API DRM hardware-accelerated video decoding when using Remote Play with the newest Steam beta...

Intel engineers on Wednesday released OpenVINO 2023.3 as the latest major update to this leading open-source AI toolkit. The OpenVINO 2023.3 brings "full support" for new Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake processors, other Intel hardware support improvements, and continuing to expand support around generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs)...

Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series...

Earlier this month the GCC 14 compiler landed initial support for AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics processors as part of the GNU Compiler Collection's OpenMP device offloading support for GPU compute. That initial support was rather basic but a follow-up patch has the possibility of making the RDNA3 (GFX11) support "working for most purposes" and will hopefully still be merged in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release...

The Zed code editor being led by the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework have announced today that the Zed editor is being open-sourced...

AMD announced back during CES the Radeon RX 7600 XT as a $329 USD graphics card for 1080p/1440p gaming. Today that card goes on sale and the review embargo has lifted. Here is an initial look at the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT performance under Linux with AMD's open-source driver stack.

For going along with today's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features...

Teflon has been merged into Mesa 24.1 as a Gallium3D front-end that TensorFlow can load for delegating the execution of operations in a neural network model. Teflon was created initially for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for being able to run AI inferencing on Vivante NPUs...

Red Hat's Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.9.12 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution that is developed along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for simplifying system firmware and peripheral/device firmware updates under Linux...

Following discussions from last year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver has been proposed for the Linux kernel. This driver would expose /dev/ntsync as a new character device for implementing some of the Windows NT synchronization primitives directly within the Linux kernel. In turn this would help the performance of some Windows games/applications running on Linux via Wine and in some cases would mean significantly better performance...

The cross-platform OBS software that is popular with game streamers and others live-recording their desktops has finally landed support for AV1 video encoding using Linux's Video Acceleration API (VA-API) interface...

AMD's GPUOpen team today released version 1.4.33 of the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. The AMF SDK continues to be focused on delivering optimal access to AMD hardware for multimedia processing under both Windows and Linux...

While AMD's GPUOpen team developed the Radeon Memory Visualizer for their own Radeon graphics processors, thanks to the software working out well and being open-source and the profiling/dump format being public, the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver has added support for it. With the Intel ANV Mesa driver you can now generate Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) compatible dumps that can then be loaded into the GPUOpen software for analyzing the video memory behavior of Intel's integrated and discrete graphics...

In addition to Firefox 122 making it to stable today, Google has also promoted their Chrome 121 web browser to its stable channel...

It's 2024 and sadly the real-time (RT) patches still have yet to be mainlined for the Linux kernel. At least though the out-of-tree patches continue to be quickly re-based and decrease in size over time... Out today is the Linux v6.8-rc1-rt1 patches for bringing the real-time support against the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel...

The review embargo has now expired on the Framework Laptop 16, the latest innovative and upgradeable laptop from this company that has made quite a name for itself with modular and user-upgradeable laptop designs for both AMD and Intel. The new Framework Laptop 16 offers even more customizability around the keyboard/touchpad and other options including over using a Radeon RX 7700S graphics module and more. Besides the immense customizability options and upgrades available with the Framework Laptop 16, the new model employs the AMD Ryzen 7040HS processor for even greater performance over the AMD Ryzen 7040U found with the latest Framework 13 model.

Over the weekend I shared some benchmarks showing some nice performance gains with Linux 6.7 over the 6.6 kernel when running on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X HEDT processor within the new System76 Thelio. So now you may be wondering about the performance with the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel... Here are some early tests there...

While Intel's Sierra Forest as their first all-E-core Xeon processor with up to 288 cores per socket isn't launching until around the middle of this calendar year, Intel Linux engineers already sent out their first kernel patch in beginning to target its successor: Clearwater Forest...

The Gentoo Linux project published a 2023 retrospective on Monday that outlines their ongoing high level of development, gaining three new developers over the past calendar year, and various initiatives embarked on by the developers...

Today marks the first Mozilla Firefox feature release of 2024 with quite a number of new features to showcase in the newly-published Firefox 122...

Valve has rolled out Proton 8.0-5 as the newest version of their Wine downstream for powering Steam Play to enjoy mass amounts of Windows games to run rather well on Linux...

For those wanting to use an open-source Coreboot-based firmware on your desktop with modern hardware, a rare and leading option is 3mdeb's Coreboot-based "Dasharo" firmware on select MSI Z690/Z790 motherboards...

A change merged today for the Linux 6.8 kernel intentionally following yesterday's Linux 6.8-rc1 is a move to enable the "-Wstringop-overflow" compiler option by default...

As part of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series launch RTX Remix was announced for helping game modders remaster older game titles for RTX/ray-tracing. RTX Remix 0.1 debuted last April as the initial version of their software to provide path-tracing support for classic games. Out today is the latest work for helping to remaster classic games with the debut of RTX Remix 0.4...

FreeBSD developers are currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the FreeBSD base system...

Fedora Linux already ships an iotop-c package for this C alternative to the common iotop program for reporting I/O metrics under Linux, but with the upcoming Fedora 40 release it's looking at having iotop-c replace the original iotop...

Released earlier this month was Linux Mint 21.3 and out-of-the-box it continues to run on the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel... Quite old at this point and was the Ubuntu 22.04 default for which Linunx Mint 21 is based. For those unable to boot Linux Mint 21.3 due to running on newer AMD/Intel hardware or other platform compatibility issues, the Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are now published that utilize Linux 6.5 by default...

While back in December the GNOME dynamic triple buffering was self-proclaimed to be "ready to merge", so far that hasn't happened yet. With the GNOME 46 feature freeze scheduled for 10 February, it remains to be seen if this long-worked-on dynamic triple/double buffering will be ready in time for this six month release. In any event, this past week saw a new optimization queued for this code...

Fedora 40 is looking at bpfman for serving as the default eBPF program manager to simplify the deployment and administration of said eBPF programs...

More than one week ago was the main Bcachefs feature pull for Linux 6.8 that included further enhancing the performance and other features of this new file-system merged back in Linux 6.7. Yesterday, just prior to the Linux 6.8-rc1 release, a secondary set of Bcachefs updates were merged for this next kernel version...

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost Internet and electricity amid winter storms last weekend and was without them for most of this week, he's still managed to deliver an on-time Linux 6.8-rc1 release following the two week merge window...

When it comes to the Linux kernel's "crypto" subsystem for various cryptographic and compression algorithms and various hardware drivers, the new additions for Linux 6.8 are particularly interesting on the Intel side...

Sent in last week were all of the media driver updates for Linux 6.8. Arguably most notable is the introduction of the StarFive Camera Subsystem driver as a new image sensor processor driver initially being treated as a staging driver...

Following the work on enhancing the scalability of the MQ-Deadline I/O scheduler, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has applied similar scalability improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler...

Along with the USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman also submitted the char/misc changes during the back-half of the week for this new kernel version...

Merged this week were the USB and Thunderbolt driver changes for the nearly-closed Linux 6.8 merge window...

For those on a new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series system at least, the recently released Linux 6.7 stable kernel is looking mighty good at least for the Threadripper 7980X when testing on the newly-launched System76 Thelio Major...

Serpent OS as the latest Linux distribution project of well known developer Ikey Doherty is off to a great start for 2024. Following all their Rust infrastructure work last year, that infrastructure work has continued while also taking on new challenges for the new year...

While the new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs may feel fast with pushing 11~12k MB/s sequential reads and writes, a Ceph storage cluster has just broken the 1 TiB/s threshold...

Submitted and merged on Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window were the LoongArch processor changes for this new kernel version. Most singificant for these Chinese processors is now supporting the Rust Linux kernel integration...

There's just over one month to go until the release of the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6. This week KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Gear applications have been branched...

Last weekend the Linux 6.8 merge window paused due to Linus Torvalds losing Internet connectivity and electricity. It lasted for the better part of the week but then managed to get back to work and now thankfully has been back online albeit with intermittent electrical issues following a brutal winter storm...

While SDL 3.0 remains under development as the next major release for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by games and other software for cross-platform handling, SDL 2.30 RC1 was released today as the newest of the SDL2 series...

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime...

Days after delivering a nice boost to Linux I/O performance, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has tackled another storage-related bottleneck within the kernel...

Merged as part of an initial batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel is support for enabling the GFXOFF feature when ROCm compute applications are active on GFX11 (RDNA3) hardware...

When it comes to AMD Zen 4 laptop testing to date I've done a lot of testing with the Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U which have proved to be very capable 8-core / 16-thread laptop processors with performant integrated graphics and running great on Linux -- besides the current lack of Ryzen AI. Recently TUXEDO Computer sent over their newly announced Pulse 14 Gen 3 Linux laptop featuring the Ryzen 7 7840HS part, which is the focus of today's testing.

For those wanting to build/mod their own Linux gaming handheld or craft a controller for other uses, the Adafruit Seesaw gamepad has a driver premiering with Linux 6.8...