Phoronix

This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on some new features coming for Fedora 40 this April...

Webcameras on newer Intel laptops have been challenging for Linux use without resorting to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space components, but that's been thankfully changing with progress being made on an open-source stack. There's still proprietary firmware necessary for enabling the IPU6 image processing unit, but at least that too is now in linux-firmware.git for easy distribution and packaging by Linux distributions...

Since last August AMD Linux engineers have been working on P-State Preferred Core support for the "amd_pstate" driver so that this functionality can be leveraged under Linux for improved task placement...

January was a busy month with a number of notable hardware launches from the Framework 16 laptop to the new AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs to the new System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series. There were 268 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles on Phoronix during the last month. With all that daily original content, here's a look back at the most popular news and reviews from January...

Last week CodeWeavers engineer Elizabeth Figura posted the initial patches for a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver for Linux for exposing /dev/ntsync for exposing some synchronization primitives available under Windows directly within the Linux kernel. This has the potential of sharply speeding up some Windows games and applications running under Wine on Linux or the likes of Valve's Steam Play (Proton). This week a second iteration of the patches were posted...

AMD on Wednesday evening released ROCm 6.0.2 as the newest point release to their open-source compute stack...

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers...

In addition to this week's release of GNU Binutils 2.42, ending out January is the release of the GNU C Library 2.39. This C library "libc" update comes with several new features, security fixes, and other enhancements...

You may recall from a few months back that the "open-source Windows" project ReactOS was going to be working on improving its GUI setup/installation. Progress is indeed being made there as shared in the latest ReactOS blog entry around further enhancing its GUI installer as an alternative to the text-mode setup...

Back in November 2022 AMD announced Brotli-G for GPU-accelerated Brotli compression. Brotli has proven very worthwhile for compressing web assets and other material while AMD's Brotli-G modifies the bitstream format to be more optimal for handling by GPUs rather than just relying on CPU (de)compression. Today Brotli-G 1.0 was finally released...

Here's a fresh look at the AMD Radeon versus NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics/gaming performance across a variety of workloads as well as our first look at the GeForce RTX 4070 series and RTX 4080 SUPER performance. With recently receiving the rest of the GeForce RTX 40 series line-up currently released, we're now able to share a comprehensive look at how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series versus AMD Radeon RX 7000 series performance is under Linux.

The newest frontier by the Linux Foundation is getting involved with coming up with a formal file format specification for Lottie, the vector graphics animation format based on JSON...

Posted at the start of 2022 was a set of 2.3k patches dubbed "fast kernel headers" to massively speed-up build times for compiling the kernel and to address dependency hell situations. While it was quick to iterate at first and some bits got upstreamed, it's been months since hearing anything new on the fast kernel headers topic. But today a new patch series was posted that's restarting the effort in working towards massively speeding up kernel build times...

Releasing at the end of February is the much anticipated Plasma 6.0 desktop where the Wayland session is the default. Plasma 6.0 will be joined by KDE Frameworks 6.0 and the Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps too. Out today for closing out January is the second release candidate of these packages...

LibreOffice 24.2 is now available as the latest major update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office...

Merged overnight for Linux 6.8 is enhancing the EROFS read-only open-source file-system to perform better in low-memory scenarios. Not just better, but significantly better performance...

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for improved thermal/power/performance behavior under Linux works for Zen 2 and newer systems where the platform exposes ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) support. There's been a caveat though of the "amd_pstate" driver having issues for the Zen2-based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. With a newly-published set of patches, that issue should be resolved...

The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux...

Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation...

While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux...

AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP...

For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems...

The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment...

For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors...

ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero...

As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed...

Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack...

It looks like the Red Hat change restricting access to RHEL sources that was announced last year is having the unintended consequence of causing some headaches for CentOS special interest group (SIG) projects...

As a follow-up to last week's article around the GCC compiler seeing patches for AMD RDNA3 GPU support so that it's "working for most purposes", that code has now been merged and it's also been confirmed to also bring the RDNA2 support up to a working state...

Linux hardware vendor Purism that is known for their crowd-funded Librem 5 smartphone effort, Linux-loaded laptops, and other privacy-minded wares announced a first public offering of Purism stock on the StartEngine platform...

Nick Clifton with Red Hat announced today the release of GNU Binutils 2.42, the newest feature release to this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and Unix-like systems as part of the compiler toolchain...

Today the review embargo lifts on the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G desktop APUs. Announced back during CES, the Ryzen 8000G series pairs Zen 4 CPU cores with RDNA3 graphics and now also boasting Ryzen AI support too. Today's launch article is focusing on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux performance.

Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software...

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there is already a NZXT Kraken Linux driver for supporting hardware monitoring and controls for various NZXT all-in-one CPU liquid cooler products. A new Linux driver was posted today for supporting the latest generation of the NZXT AIO CPU coolers...

While a number of Linux distributions are experimenting with x86-64-v2 baselines or offering x86-64-v3 optimized packages for assuming AVX/AVX2 support by default for their packages, the CachyOS Linux distribution has been experimenting with offering x86-64-v4 packages for those running on Intel or AMD systems with AVX-512 support...

GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers...

Ubuntu has long provided a "low-latency" kernel build intended for industrial embedded systems and other latency sensitive environments. Ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical is looking at applying those low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel build...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.8-rc2 as the newest weekly test release of this kernel set to debut as stable in March...

With a goal of delivering a Wayland-only Budgie 10 desktop release later in 2024, Budgie 10.9 debuted today with the early-stage porting work to Wayland...

Now being past the Wine 9.0 code freeze and the bi-weekly development releases back underway with eyes now set on Wine 10.0 next year, the 12th part of the Wine Wayland driver has been published for review. This latest set of Wine Wayland work is on implementing display mode change emulation...

New code submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 cycle are some AMD additions now set for premiering in today's Linux 6.8-rc2 release...

There's been some new work pending for further enhancing the GNOME desktop when it comes around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR). Separately, there's new merge requests pending for adding laptop battery charge threshold controls from the GNOME UI...

TuxClocker as the open-source, hardware/driver vendor independent overclocking and power management control utility for Linux systems is out with a new feature release. This Qt-based utility for enthusiasts continues adding new controls primarily around greater power/performance tunables for CPUs and GPUs...

The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion...

Endeavour OS as the popular desktop rolling-release Linux distribution built upon Arch Linux has published updated ISOs that bundle in the stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well as other package updates...

As some terrific news, Canonical laid out their kernel plans for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and they are being ambitious with plans to ship the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel as their default kernel on this next long-term support Ubuntu desktop/server distribution...

The Budgie desktop that started off as the desktop project within the Solus Linux space has written a lengthy blog post outlining their highlights for 2023 as well as providing a glimpse ahead for 2024. The Budgie desktop is working eagerly on Wayland and XWayland support and hope to advance enough this year to deliver a Wayland-only release...

The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support...

We're nearly one month to the day until the release of the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release alongside the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0. Developers aren't letting up at all with more performance optimizations and fixes continuing to hit the codebase...