Phoronix

Sent in overnight was this week's batch of DRM "fixes" for Linux 6.8 that included some mostly minor fixes plus a few notable but small patches to Nouveau, the upstream open-source NVIDIA DRM/KMS kernel driver...

The Simple DirectMedia Library that is commonly used as an abstraction layer by cross-platform games and other software is now introducing a Vulkan renderer with SDL3...

As a follow-up to the news of Mesa looking at enabling Zink by default as part of the drivers to build out-of-the-box, that change has now been merged. Additionally, the D3D12 Mesa driver that sees regular contributions by Microsoft engineers is also now being compiled by default when running on Windows...

NetworkManager 1.46 was released on Thursday as the newest stable update to this software commonly used for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections from the Linux desktop as well as from command-line environments via the nmcli utility...

It's been almost exactly one month since the release of AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 and today that's been succeded by AMDVLK 2024.Q1.2 that brings a number of new Vulkan extensions plus some performance tuning...

OpenZFS 2.2.3 is out today as the first update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation since OpenZFS 2.2.2 from early December when it was released for dealing with a data corruption issue...

Matthew Wilcox with Oracle who previously worked on the Maple Tree data structure for the Linux kernel along with memory folios has now proposed "Rosebush" as a new hash table data structure for the Linux kernel...

As part of the recent AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and 8600G Linux reviews I ended up picking up the Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 Raptor Lake Refresh processors for the similarly-priced Intel competition. It's not too often receiving review samples from Intel of the lower-end processor SKUs, so I'm back around today with even more benchmarks of these lower-tier AMD and Intel processors. In this article are 500+ benchmarks looking at the CPU and iGPU performance of the Intel Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 processors up against the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors under Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical has released the Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS images today as the latest point release for this ongoing Long-Term Support series ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS debut in April...

Building atop Wine 9.0 stable that released last month, CodeWeavers today released their commercial CrossOver 24 software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS systems...

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation...

Ardour 8.4 was released this week as the newest update to this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux / macOS / Windows platforms...

Back in August 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced plans to open-source MoonRay as their production-grade renderer used on films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other animated films. Nearly one year ago in March 2023 MoonRay was open-sourced as OpenMoonRay while this week brings the latest iteration of it: OpenMoonRay 1.5...

The KDE Plasma 6 open-source desktop environment is launching next week and ahead of that the Slimbook V has been announced, the latest laptop crafted in partnership between the KDE project and Slimbook. This KDE-catered Linux laptop will feature the Plasma 6.0 desktop experience out-of-the-box and is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 processor...

For those in Turkey with Casper laptops or otherwise having access to that Turkish PC brand, their Excalibur line of higher-end laptops could soon see better Linux support thanks to a new WMI driver proposal...

GIMP 2.99.18 was released today as the last planned development version prior in the long road to GIMP 3.0 that has been a decade in the making for this free software Adobe Photoshop alternative...

The first "Power11" patches were queued today into the PowerPC's "next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Intel has released a new version of QATlib, their user-space support library for the QuickAssist Technology (QAT) via add-in hardware and recent Xeon Scalable processors...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for modern OpenGL support works on hardware going back to old Broadwell processors with "Gen8" integrated graphics as does the HasVK Vulkan driver for Haswell/Broadwell. But in allowing to focus on the common Skylake "Gen9" graphics and newer/future Intel graphics architectures, pending Mesa code is working to split-off that old Broadwell/Gen8 code. The Gen8 support will continue to be in-tree but separated from the rest of the compiler code so that the code can continue to be improved for newer Intel hardware without risking regressions/breaking those still on Broadwell era processors...

WebKitGTK as the port of the WebKit rendering engine used by GNOME Web (Epipahny) and other software for displaying web content is transitioning to using Skia for its 2D rendering...

Fraunhofer on Tuesday released their latest feature update to the Versatile Video Encoder for open-source H.266/VVC encoding...

Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs...

When it comes to today's complex RGB lighting for PC peripherals and the like it's mostly been left up to user-space. With most RGB devices interfacing via USB, it's been up to Linux user-space projects like OpenRGB, OpenRazer, etc, to implement their RGB lighting controls as needed. But as RGB lighting use continues to grow in the PC space for better or worse, there's an increasing need for a kernel API to handle complex RGB devices. Such an API is currently being devised...

As many enthusiasts wait to hear from AMD more broadly supporting ROCm in an official capacity across consumer Radeon GPUs and/or hearing about better supporting more Linux distributions outside of the major enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD announced a new medium for their communications with the community: the "New AMD ROCm Software Blog Platform" will be rolling out...

At the end of last year Intel hosted a survey of open-source developers to collect their feeback on various open-source software issues. Intel's 2023 Open Source Community Survey is all wrapped up, the data tallied up, and the results emailed out today to participants...

The Bcachefs file-system that was mainlined to the Linux kernel last year has received a grant from the NLNet Foundation...

Earlier this month I posted some initial CPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper up against AMD EPYC Zen 4 and Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids processors. That was a very interesting battle and showed the interesting capabilities of the 72 Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. With this GPTshop.ai GH200 system actually being in workstation form, I also ran some additional benchmarks looking at the CPU capabilities of the GH200 compared to AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series workstations.

Red Hat announced today some changes to how they handle their beta releases for minor updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

There are some new Linux kernel patches that were posted by Intel on Monday that aim to help enhance the overall performance and power efficiency of new Meteor Lake laptop processors under Linux...

There are still no signs of a new X.Org Server feature release coming in the near-term with most of the major stakeholders divesting from the xorg-server besides the XWayland portion of the code-base. But for those interested in the past few days there have been some NetBSD/OpenBSD build fixes to the X.Org Server as well as clearing out some remnants of old compiler support...

With Valve's release today of the Steam Audio SDK 4.5.2 they have made the software development kit fully open-source under an Apache 2.0 license...

For years Wine developers have been after a better synchronization API for the Linux kernel to better match the semantics of Microsoft Windows. Posted back in January was a request for comments on an "NTSYNC" Linux kernel driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel. At the start of the month a post-RFC version was posted of this open-source driver and today the latest iteration of that work has been published to the kernel mailing list...

For over two years Red Hat's engineers working on the Anaconda installer have been working on a modern web-based installer UI that integrates with Cockpit and is a modern alternative to their GTK-based installer interface for deploying Fedora Linux and eventually RHEL too. The hope was to offer this web UI installer option for Fedora Workstation 40 but that's now been delayed to Fedora 41...

Following the initial AMDGPU driver updates targeting Linux 6.9 that were submitted to DRM-Next one week ago, another batch of AMDGPU feature updates were sent out today ahead of this next kernel cycle kicking off in March...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek announced the first-ever release of Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built on top of Mir...

Intel is upstreaming the necessary Lunar Lake "LNL" graphics firmware nice and early to linux-firmware.git for their "Xe2" integrated graphics...

Firefox 123.0 binaries are available today ahead of the official announcement tomorrow for this newest monthly web browser update...

Back in January 2023 was an attempt to disable kernel drivers for Microsoft's RNDIS protocol. The Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) is home to security concerns for this protocol built atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. Later in the year the effort to disable RNDIS on Linux was tried again without going mainline. In recent days it looks like there will be a fresh attempt at getting the RNDIS driver support disabled...

Posted on Sunday was the third iteration of the patches working toward the threaded/atomic non-blocking console "NBCON" support that is known to be one of the last blockers to sort out before the remainder of the Linux real-time "RT" patches can be upstreamed...

The Intel "i915" LInux kernel graphics driver has been working to wrap-up support for enabling Adaptive Sync SDP for DisplayPort (DP) for their graphics cards...

Linux 6.8-rc5 is out as the latest weekly test release of Linux 6.8 ahead of its stable debut in March...

For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle there are a number of AMD Instinct MI300 additions to the EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) and RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) drivers...

Cloud Hypervisor 38 rolled out this week as the newest version of this Rust-based VMM that was started by Intel while now a Linux Foundation hosted project being worked on by multiple different organizations...

Last April was a display/HDR hackfest hosted in the Czech Republic by Red Hat. Another Linux display hackfest has been announced for this year so upstream stakeholders can collaborate around high dynamic range (HDR) monitor support, color management, variable refresh rate (VRR), and other topics...

With Linux 6.8 the kernel's Rust code was brought up to Rust 1.75 while new patches posted this weekend port the code over to Rust 1.76 and then the upcoming Rust 1.77...

The GNOME 46 beta is out today for featuring the latest fixes and last-minute enhancements to this open-source desktop environment update due out in March...

System76 has been developing the Rust-based COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution but its usage won't be artificially limited to that in-house distro. Among other distributions that have been looking toward packaging it, interest is currently being evaluated in creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) for the COSMIC desktop environment...

The Ubuntu 24.04 LTS desktop installer has rolled out accessibility options built into the initial GUI for helping enable additional features...

While recent graphics cards support GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding, for those still relying on dav1d for CPU-based AV1 decode there is now version 1.4 "Road Runner" available that adds support for LoongArch and RISC-V architectures while continuing to further enhance the performance of this open-source AV1 decoder on x86_64 Intel/AMD processors too...

There is just two weeks to go until the much-anticipated KDE 6 Mega-Release that includes KDE Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6, and the updated KDE Gear apps. KDE developers continue fixing bugs as well as already working on KDE Plasma 6.1 features...