Phoronix

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week...

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update...

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2...

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025...

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine...

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos...

Merged into Mesa 24.2 on Thursday is Vulkan sparse binding support for the CPU-based Lavapipe driver...

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work...

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso had been doing a lot of work on the Etnaviv driver stack for open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante driver support that began with the 3D graphics support but Vizoso tackled enabling the Vivante NPU IP as well. After all the successes with the Etnaviv NPU support, he turned his attention to creating an open-source driver stack for the Rockchip NPUs. Now thanks to a new sponsorship deal, he's back to making more Etnaviv improvements...

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution...

Sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms...

Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell. Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies...

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers...

PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams...

The NVIDIA 555.58 Linux driver has debuted this morning as the first stable version in the R555 driver series. The NVIDIA 555 Linux driver is the most exciting in recent times with offering Wayland explicit sync support, more stable Wayland support in general, and GSP firmware is now used by default on RTX 20 / Turing and newer GPUs where the GPU System Processor is present...

Linux 6.11 is shaping up to be an exciting summertime kernel cycle for AMD Ryzen owners. The newest feature now being queued ahead of next month's merge window is Core Performance Boost support within the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...

Sent out on Wednesday were the latest set of DRM-Xe-Next changes of the last round of feature updates for this Xe kernel graphics driver targeting the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

AMD compiler engineers have released AOMP 19.0-2 as the newest version of their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler that carries all of their latest work around OpenMP/AOCC GPU device offloading to Radeon and Instinct hardware. With this updated AOMP compiler is now run-time support for zero-copy with CPU-GPU unified shared memory and various other new features for this GPU/accelerator-focused compiler...

Last year a new kernel feature merged in Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps for file-systems as a means of better timestamp handling originally for NFS compared to the existing coarse-grained timestamps with the once per jiffy timestamps being used for invalidating NFS caches. But multi-grain timestamps was reverted just weeks after landing in the mainline kernel due to corner cases like a newer file with a coarse-grained timestamp appearing earlier than another file with a fine-grained timestamp. Due to subtle bugs like that, multi-grain timestamps were dropped before Linux 6.6 was even released while now there is a revised attempt...

Upcoming Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors will support a new Structural Based Functional Test at Field (SBAF) testing capability to help verify the health of the CPU cores...

Following a more than one year long process, the Free Software Foundation today named three additional board members...

Intel today issued the Compute Runtime 24.22.29735.20 release as their open-source driver providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities on Windows and Linux systems. This update was joined by an updated Intel Graphics Compiler, IGC 1.0.16900.23...

Archinstall 2.8.1 is now available for the newest version of this easy-to-use, command-line driven installer for the Arch Linux operating system...

System76 developers are still on track for releasing the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop in late July...

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced "Everything LTS" as a new initiative where for Ubuntu Pro customers they will offer up a twelve year LTS period for any open-source Docker image...

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a Rust-based OpenCL driver for GPUs backed by Gallium3D support now works with the Broadcom V3D driver. This V3D support is notable as it's most commonly associated with the Raspberry Pi single board computers...

AMD has published AMDVLK 2024.Q2.3 as the newest version of their open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for the Xe2 next-generation graphics to be found with forthcoming Lunar Lake processors and the Battlemage discrete graphics cards...

NVIDIA has upstreamed a patch to the GCC 15 compiler for adding the "-mcpu=grace" option to make it easier to target NVIDIA Grace AArch64 CPU cores from this open-source compiler...

OpenSUSE has released Leap Micro 6.0 as stable for this community rebranded build of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 6.0. Leap Micro continues to be focused on delivering a very reliable and robust experience for containers and virtual machines...

A change proposal has been approved for Fedora 41 to make OpenSSL distrust SHA1 signatures by default...

Engineers at consulting firm Igalia are exploring NUMA emulation for ARM64 (AArch64) due to the potential of "significant" performance uplift as observed on the popular Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer...

With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop...

When testing Intel's aggressive software Linux optimizations shipped by way of their in-house Clear Linux distribution, I am most often testing it on their high core count Xeon processors with AVX-512... Over the years in dozens of Phoronix articles there have been countless metrics showing off the out-of-the-box performance benefits from leveraging software built for higher x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels, employing compiler-based function multi-versioning, and the other extensive performance tuning carried out by Intel software engineers. But now with the Intel Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" series now being available for these all-E-core server processors, I was curious about quantifying the Clear Linux benefits over the likes of Ubuntu Linux. Here are those benchmarks for those curious about the difference.

Back in May the Raspberry Pi crew announced Raspberry Pi Access as an easy means of remote GUI access to Raspberry Pi single board computers all from a web browser. Today they've announced the latest improvements to Raspberry Pi Connect...

Earlier this month AMD Fast CPPC support was queued into the Linux power management subsystem's "-next" codebase ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle. Additional AMD P-State driver enhancements are now deemed ready and submitted for staging ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off...

The open-source Intel ANV Vulkan driver has recently been seeing improvements around better handling the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

With Fedora's new web-based installer UI being delayed to 2025 with Fedora 42, part of Red Hat's justification for that setback was needing to invest resources first in Fedora 41 by transitioning the OS installer to being a native Wayland application. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on that work as expected to make the Anaconda OS installer a native Wayland application...

OpenShot 3.2 has been released as the latest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editor that is popular on Linux systems...

Related to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz for significantly improving the Mesa glReadPixels performance by more than 100%, the open-source driver developer at Valve has now enabled compute PBO blits within mainline Mesa for the AMD Radeon "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver...

Llamafile has been one of the better new initiatives out of Mozilla in recent years. Llamafile makes it easy to conveniently distribute and run large language models as a single file while supporting both CPU and GPU execution and all-around making AI LLMs much more approachable for end-users. Out today is Llamafile 0.8.7 with more performance optimizations and new features...

A new set of patches are currently being tested for improving task scheduling and in turn performance for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. With the patch also mentioning systems that are hybrid but without SMT, this looks like it may be some early tuning as well for upcoming Intel Lunar Lake processors that lack Hyper Threading...

With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver...

Just a friendly reminder that if you've been procrastinating in migrating past the once-great CentOS Linux 7, there is less than one week to go now until it's officially end-of-life...

Qualcomm engineers on Sunday posted patches for enabling the Adreno X1-85 GPU within the MSM DRM driver. The Adreno X1-85 GPU is what's found within the Snapdragon X Elite SoC powering various new Windows ARM laptops although the Linux support continues maturing too for these platforms...

Back during the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle support was added for the ASUS ROG Raikiri as a newer gaming controller. Now on its way for landing in Linux 6.10 is support for the ASUS ROG Raikiri Pro...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 6.10-rc5 as the newest weekly test release leading up to the Linux 6.10 stable release by mid-July...

Back in 2019 after various speculation-based CPU vulnerabilities began coming to light, Amazon engineers proposed process-local memory allocations for hiding KVM secrets. They were striving for an alternative mitigation for vulnerabilities like L1TF by essentially providing some memory regions for kernel allocations out of view/access from other kernel code. Amazon engineers this week laid out a new proposal after five years of ongoing Linux kernel improvements for MM-local memory allocations for dealing with current and future speculation-based cross-process attacks...

The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers...