Phoronix

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware...

Oracle engineers continue working on the TrenchBoot initiative to advance boot security and integrity for Linux. The tenth iteration of the TrenchBoot patches were posted this week as it works its way toward the mainline kernel...

Miracle-WM as the Mir-powered Wayland compositor inspired by i3 and Sway is out with another new release. It's rather ironic that while Miracle-WM is principally developed by a Canonical engineer associated with Ubuntu Linux, these recent Miracle-WM releases are being driven in part by preparing for a Fedora Miracle spin due out as part of the Fedora Linux 41 release in October...

The Godot open-source, cross-platform game engine continues advancing wonderfully as an alternative to the more well established but proprietary and commercial-focused game engines. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 released today as the first tagged development snapshot toward the next version of this great game engine...

Cemu is the Wii U emulator that went open-source and began building on Linux two years ago. Since then they've continued building up their Linux support and out today is the Cemu 2.1 emulator release with even better Linux support...

Last week an AmpereOne server finally arrived at Phoronix! Ampere Computing sent over a reviewer server of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship AArch64 server processor with 192 custom cores and using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD platform. I have been carrying out a number of benchmarks for this much-anticipated AArch64 cloud native processor and have initial performance and power efficiency metrics to share today to see how it compares to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server competition.

In addition to the recent news of AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborating over improvements, some more good news for this leading BSD open-source project is the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) now beginning to invest in FreeBSD...

Ubuntu maker Canonical partnered with AMD for supporting Ubuntu Linux on the AMD-Xilinx Kria development boards for their UltraScale+ / Versal Adaptive SoC evaluation kit. Currently the official builds are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but it appears an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS build is being worked on and will come complete with Wayland support...

Earlier this month Intel compiler engineers began adding AVX10.2 support into the GCC 15 open-source compiler. Now as we approach the end of August, another big batch of AVX10.2 enablement has landed for this next GNU Compiler Collection release...

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land...

Released on Sunday night was a new version of the Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) Zstd plug-in for accelerating Zstandard compression with QAT-enabled adapters and modern Xeon Scalable processors sporting QAT accelerators...

Linux 6.11 as often is the case each kernel cycle brings a lot of new improvements for recent/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms. There are big step forwards for AMD confidential computing, initial RDNA4 graphics support, new AMD P-State driver features, and much more on the AMD side. On the Intel side there is ongoing work around Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage but not yet stable. Intel also has initial Panther Lake audio support, more NPU driver enhancements, and a range of other kernel additions to benefit their platforms.

The Linux 6.11-rc5 kernel is already out as stable today, roughly a half-day ahead of time due to travels by Linus Torvalds...

Codon is an open-source project that leverages the LLVM compiler infrastructure and aims for super fast Python code with as much as 10~100x speedups. Released this week was Codon 0.17 as the newest step forward for this alternative Python implementation...

Just one week after the Archinstall 2.8.2 update, another release of this command-line driven Arch Linux installer is now available for quick and easy Arch deployments...

As the first new release in more than one year, GNU DDD 3.4.1 is now available as a GUI front-end to the GNU Debugger (GDB)...

Mesa's PanVK driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Arm Mali graphics is preparing to support newer "Valhall" hardware...

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer...

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 has been released ahead of its planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series delivers the latest and greatest, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still depending upon a FreeBSD 13 base...

Ahead of the KDE Plasma 6.2 soft feature freeze happening next week, KDE developers have been preparing some last minut features for the desktop...

Wine 9.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications on Linux...

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage...

The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization...

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window...

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding...

As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support...

In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS...

While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled...

The upstream Linux "oxp-sensors" driver began as a driver for supporting the sensors on the OneXPlayer handheld. With time this driver has been extended to support more handheld gaming consoles and a new patch enables support for several more devices...

KDE Gear 24.08 has been released for this collection of KDE applications that pair with the Plasma desktop...

With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October...

The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations...

Intel software engineers are responsible for many of the great x86_64-related optimizations to the GNU C Library "glibc" over the years. While they've extensively tuned many Glibc functions for achieving peak performance on their modern CPUs, it's a never-ending quest. Merged this week was another optimization to strnlen(), the function for determining the number of bytes in a fixed-size string...

While celebrating the 9th birthday of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released a new version of the Fwupd firmware updating utility...

LibreOffice 24.8 is officially out today as the latest major feature update to this open-source office suite that's the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office. With LibreOffice 24.8 comes many new features throughout its various components...

Google has promoted Chrome 128 to its stable channel across macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms...

Intel's uncore Linux platform driver is preparing for a new feature found on newer SoCs: ELC, or Efficiency Latency Control. This ELC feature for the Intel uncore handling allows fine tuning efficiency versus latency characteristics...

As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued...

This week marks nine years since the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was started by Richard Hughes of Red Hat to ease the firmware updating/distribution process with the open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility...

Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems...

Google engineer Qais Yousef has posted a set of 16 patches for the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization code within the Linux kernel to better manage system response time. Schedutil is often used by default on many Linux distributions and with these patches a popular web browser benchmark can be as much as 30% faster with these kernel patches...

Following all of the Snapdragon X1 upstream enablement work over the past number of months by Qualcomm and then DeviceTree additions emerging for enabling the likes of the ASUS Vivobook S 15, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, and Microsoft Surface 7, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is the newest Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop seeing Linux DT support...

Zed, the code/text editor being developed by former Atom editor developers, has continued to gain interest among developers since going open-source, being written in the Rust programming language, and native Linux builds taking shape. The latest feature work on Zed is beginning to integrate AI-powered functionality by leveraging Anthropic's Claude LLM...

SVT-AV1 2.2 is now available for this leading open-source AV1 video encoder. With this new version comes yet more performance optimizations...

Released last month was the VirtualBox 7.1 Beta 1 virtualization software release from Oracle. This new version is bringing a modernized GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing, and other improvements. Released yesterday was the second beta of this big VirtualBox update...

Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop...

Andrea della Porta of SUSE has been working on upstreaming the Linux kernel support to boot the Raspberry Pi 5 on a mainline kernel. Over the past few months Andrea has posted a number of different patches derived in part from Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel code. The latest effort being pursued by the SUSE engineer is on upstreaming Raspberry Pi RP1 PCI device support using a DeviceTree overlay...

As part of my ongoing AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Linux testing, last week I provided a look at the AVX-512 benefits to Zen 5 and also the Windows vs. Linux performance for the Ryzen 9 9950X. For sharing today is a look at multiple Linux distributions up and running on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) desktop. Among the distributions in the mix are Intel's Clear Linux distribution that is optimally tuned for maximum x86_64 Linux performance and once again even on AMD hardware shows the significant benefits to a well-tuned Linux software stack.

Queued yesterday into the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel are some important additions for Intel processors and also an important fix for AMD processors to enjoy package power monitoring...