Phoronix

Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.

Wasmer is an open-source WebAssembly implementation that is focused on running sandboxed applications everywhere thanks to the power of WASM while being as performant as traditional native applications. Today marks the availability of Wasmer 4.0 as another step forward for this project...

AlmaLinux, the popular community-oriented distribution that was established following Red Hat's decision to discontinue development on CentOS (non-Stream) and is backed by AMD and other organizations, is trying to chart its path forward following Red Hat's latest curve ball...

Going back a few years there has been experimental development around a Vulkan back-end for KDE's KWin compositor while now a road-map is being formalized for actually bringing Vulkan support to fruition...

Sent in today for the mainline Linux kernel -- days ahead of the expected Linux 6.4 stable release -- is a crash fix for just-released AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops...

Xonotic 0.8.6 is out as the latest update to this long-running, open-source first person shooter game...

Ahead of the Linux 6.5 merge window expected to open up next week, a patch providing sound quirks for the ASUS ROG Ally's CS35l41 audio is now queued in the sound subsystem's for-next branch...

Following the recent AMD IOMMU v2 page table work and other IOMMU improvements as part of AMD's effort to further enhance the Linux virtualization support on EPYC server platforms, the latest patches out of AMD as of yesterday are for wokring on hardware-accelerated virtualized IOMMU (AMD HW-vIOMMU)...

PoCL 4.0 is out as the latest major update to this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that started out as an OpenCL-on-CPU effort while with time has expanded its sights beyond just OpenCL on processors to providing OpenCL on other accelerators/devices via leveraging different LLVM target back-ends. With PoCL 4.0, there is also now an Intel oneAPI Level Zero driver for using this OpenCL stack on Intel graphics processors...

The Go 1.21 release candidate is out today and it's interesting on the performance front plus a few language additions like min / max / clear functions as well as further enhancing its standard library...

For those making use of the current Linux 6.3 stable series, Linux 6.3.9 is out today and it's particularly important if you make use of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel graphics driver...

Linux Mint as the popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu LTS releases and known for their Cinnamon desktop is out today with their 21.2 "Victoria" beta release for testing...

Red Hat announced today that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases...

Introduced with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors are various new accelerators available on select SKUs or via the Intel On Demand offering. One of the initial challenges there though is the early accelerator software support limitations and many upstream open-source (or even just widespread) software not yet enabled to make use of these new accelerators. One of the improvements on that front has been Intel engineers working on an IAA crypto compression driver for the kernel so that the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator can be transparently accessible to kernel features making use of the crypto API...

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project...

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs...

The LLVM Clang 17 C/C++ compiler when shipping later this year will now use OpenMP 5.1 as the default version of this multi-processing programming API...

With today's release of SDL 2.28 it also marks the SDL2 library entering maintenance mode for this open-source software that's relied upon by Valve and many cross-platform games...

Another feature scheduled to be sent in for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window is introducing support for provisioning primitives for thinly provisioned storage with the Device Mapper (DM) code...

The upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel is poised to add support for Qualcomm's Adreno 690 GPU to the open-source MSM kernel graphics/display driver. The A690 is notably used by the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) platform that in turn is what's found inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptop and other hardware...

As another feature on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel cycle is the large extent counts feature of the XFS file-system no longer being treated as "experimental" but is now considered safe to deploy...

Patches being queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel merge window prepare initial support for DEXCR that is found in recent Power ISA specifications...

CPU microcode updates are commonly done in the name of security fixes and resolving functionality issues.. In recent years, CPU microcode updates have been a much more common -- and important -- occurrence. While all modern CPUs rely on microcode it's just a matter of whether the version used is baked into the hardware or an updated version loaded by the BIOS or OS at boot time, a "vocal minority" of users are unhappy with CPU microcode being included in Libreboot ROMs. Thus moving forward there will be alternative builds of Libreboot for different motherboards with the CPU microcode stripped out in the name of software freedom...

If your newer desktop motherboard has a NCT6799D Super I/O controller or one of the variants like NCT6799D-S, the Linux 6.5 kernel is set to introduce support for this ASIC in order to expose hardware sensor support under Linux...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is preparing to land async buffered write support into the Linux kernel as another performance win for this flash-optimized file-system...

Red Hat engineers are working to deal with Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) being too costly for mitigating Spectre V2 and Retbleed on older Intel Xeon Scalable processors. A new patch has been floated to disable IBRS when idle and is working out well at least for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 while isn't clear yet if it will be accepted into the upstream kernel...

SVT-AV1 1.6 is now available as the latest version for this leading CPU-based AV1 encoder that is now enjoying 30~40% faster performance with high quality presets...

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle...

Stemming from looking at the generated x264 video encode binary and some performance inefficiencies, SUSE engineers have worked out AVX-512 fully masked vectorization support for the GCC 14 development code...

While the Linux 6.5 merge window isn't opening for another week, Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the pull request of the new Rust kernel code destined for this next kernel cycle...

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors...

Linus Torvalds took time out of his Father's Day to release Linux 6.4-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for this kernel that's likely to be officially released next weekend...

In going through my recent RADV-Zink vs. RadeonSI OpenGL benchmarks, Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has already been landing optimizations/fixes and there is another one on the way as a result...

NVK as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver being developed for NVIDIA graphics hardware will hopefully see YCbCr format support this summer...

This month the FreeBSD project is celebrating its 30th anniversary since this open-source BSD operating system project was established...

Following yesterday's KDE weekly development summary, prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published an update on the current state of affairs for KDE Plasma 6 along with when we may potentially see Plasma 6.0 actually released...

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has reaffirmed the company's commitment to the open-source ROCm compute stack and working with the community and ultimately improving their software support...

Some Fedora Enterprise Linux Next (ELN) plans were shared on Friday with the process of launching CentOS Stream 10 getting underway that will ultimately form the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10...

As a follow-up to yesterday's article about the believed fix for the Nouveau use-after-free bug plaguing Linux 6.3 users of this open-source NVIDIA driver, the fix has now been merged to Linux 6.4 Git and in turn should also be picked up for an upcoming Linux 6.3 point release...

Distrobox is the open-source project for quickly and easily firing up other Linux distributions as containers on your desktop. Distrobox is a delight to use if needing to try different Linux distributions on your system or wishing to leverage different distributions for specialized workloads...

It may be the middle of summer but there are no signs of Plasma 6.0 development efforts slowing down at all with this being another interesting week for KDE development...

Python 3.12 isn't even being released until October and Python 3.13 won't be out until H2'2024, but already the developers working on tuning CPython performance are aiming to make more enhancements this next development cycle...

Mozilla's Firefox 116 web-browser should have experimental PipeWire camera capturing support available for Linux users...

As a follow-up to the potentially nasty open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver bug in Linux 6.3, the issue is believed to have been figured out and a patch is pending that appears to address the issue...

Similar to prior Wayland vs. X.Org desktop comparison impact on Linux gaming, here is a fresh round of tests looking at the (X)Wayland vs. X.Org GNOME session performance with Ubuntu 23.04 and the latest NVIDIA proprietary and AMD open-source graphics drivers on Linux.

The Vulkan API v1.3.254 specification update was published today with just a few fixes/clarifications to the documentation but also two new extensions...

AMDVLK 2023.Q2.3 is out today as the newest snapshot of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver...

FreeSync Panel Replay is a new feature for AMD Ryzen laptops with the DCN v3.1.4 display block or newer for helping to reduce power usage when the screen contents are unchanged...

Arm and NXP engineers have posted the initial open-source Linux driver patches for an Ethos-U driver for their machine learning processor to enable Linux to dispatch AI inference jobs to the hardware. It's yet another inference/accelerator driver working its way toward the mainline kernel but is off to a rocky start with many code issues being raised...

A new version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" is now available, a modern Linux desktop that continues to mimic the look and feel of the old CDE Unix desktop environment...