Phoronix

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise...

Continuing on with the AmpereOne performance benchmarking while having the AmpereOne A192-32X in the lab within a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD server, the next set of benchmarks is looking at the performance when using the near-final Linux 6.11 kernel. Additionally, quantifying the performance impact of using the ARM64 64K page size kernel as an alternative to the default 4K page size.

Last year to much excitement in our community was the new AMD project announcement of openSIL as an open-source CPU silicon initialization project that is an advancement for open-source firmware and to eventually replace AMD's AGESA across both client and server processors. This week an exciting new update on AMD OpenSIL was shared and that they are still on-track for having it production-ready next year...

Ah the memories of old AGP graphics cards... But it's largely just that these days: distant memories. For anyone by chance still running an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) graphics card in production, FreeBSD is looking at deprecating its generic AGP driver and then potentially removing it in FreeBSD 15.0...

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit...

With Linux 6.12 the Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics are being enabled by default for out-of-the-box support with Intel's next-gen Xe2 graphics. Over in user-space the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver code has also begun enabling Xe2 graphics by default for use when running on Linux 6.12+. In Mesa besides no longer being hidden by the force probe option, a warning is now removed so users aren't told about unsupported Vulkan support when using Xe2 hardware...

Linux 6.11 merged getrandom() in the vDSO Support for very fast yet secure user-space random number generation needs. That work was initially focused on x86_64 but beginning with Linux 6.12 and following on this getrandom() vDSO implementation will see expanded CPU architecture support...

Succeeding OpenZFS 2.2.5 from early August is now OpenZFS 2.2.6 that brings various fixes plus newer Linux kernel compatibility...

QEMU 9.1 is out in stable form today as the newest feature release to this open-source processor emulator that plays a vital role within the free software Linux virtualization stack...

Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system has managed to address a performance bottleneck allowing this platform to perform much faster now when running as a virtual machine (VM) and for some synthetic benchmarks even able to run "slightly faster" than Linux...

Following yesterday's initial tuning of the "znver5" target for the AMD Zen 5 CPUs with the GCC 15 compiler, several more rounds of compiler tuning/optimizations were merged for benefiting the Ryzen AI 300 series, Ryzen 9000 series desktops, and upcoming EPYC Turin processors...

While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel...

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox...

Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code...

There are six accepted blocker bugs so far for the Fedora 41 Beta and three of them all pertain to Raspberry Pi issues...

Weston 14.0 was released today as the newest feature release for this reference Wayland compositor...

When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS...

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP)...

While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive...

Intel formally announced their Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors today in Berlin...

Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning...

Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series...

Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems...

Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image...

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today allow for inline tail support within the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). This inline tail support allows for saving space when storing many small files and with reduced I/O can lead to faster data copy times...

Power Profiles Daemon as the UPower project to make Linux laptop/system power profile handling via D-Bus is out with a new release. This is the Linux/open-source solution for exposing of power profiles to the Linux desktop and better managing the system state between power-saver / balanced / performance modes and other options...

Coreboot 24.08 debuted on Monday night as the newest feature release for this open-source system firmware project that allows replacing the proprietary BIOS/firmware on many different platforms. With Coreboot 24.08 comes more than 900 patches from 130+ developers in continuing to support new motherboards and making other improvements...

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images...

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning...

The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years...

One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 was released this morning as the newest version of this OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack used on both Windows and Linux platforms. Notable with the Intel Compute Runtime 24.31.30508.7 is having initial Xe2 support...

Ahead of this week's GNOME 47 release candidate announcement the "47.rc" versions of the GNOME Shell and Mutter were tagged on Sunday...

Kdenlive as the KDE-aligned non-linear open-source video editing application is out with its newest feature release...

Armbian 24.8 has been released as the newest version of this Debian-based Linux distribution that began with a focus on ARM boards but has also expanded to include RISC-V as well as traditional x86_64 Intel/AMD systems too...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey results for the month prior. The August 2024 data is in and it points to the Steam on Linux statistics dipping back below 2%...

Like with last week's Linux 6.11-rc5 release, Linux 6.11-rc6 is out a half-day early due to Linus Torvalds' ongoing foreign travels. Linux 6.11-rc6 brings many more fixes to this kernel that will debut as stable in mid-September,..

August was a very busy month with the first AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Zen 5" desktop processors going on sale, finally having AmpereOne 192-core Arm processors in the lab, Linux kernel development continuing to advance at a brisk pace, and a variety of other interesting software and hardware milestones. On Phoronix for the month were 213 original news articles authored by me as well as another 20 Linux hardware reviews / featured-length articles...

FreeBSD 13.4 is due out in just over one week's time while this weekend brought FreeBSD 13.4-RC2 as the last planned test candidate...

Arm engineer Mihail Atanassov proposed a set of "request for comments" patches this week for adding user submission support to the Panthor DRM driver that is used for handling newer Arm Mali graphics under Linux. This would allow user-space more easily to submit work directly to the GPU hardware without kernel intervention for better performance and management capabilities...

Intel has released a new version of their open-source Video Processing Library (VPL) for hardware-accelerated video encode / decode / processing across Intel graphics hardware...

Debian 12.7 is out today as the latest stable release update for the Debian Bookworm series...

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser...

This week's batch of power management fixes for the Linux 6.11 kernel are just a set of three patches for AMD processors...

A new AVX2 code path for FFmpeg's VVC decoding "vvcdec" is helping provide significant speed-ups for CPU-based H.266 decoding...

Jonas Adahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository...

Plasma 6.2 this week entered its soft feature freeze ahead of the Plasma 6.2 stable release in October. The focus now is on bug-fixing for Plasma 6.2 and at the moment they are at 301 bug reports, which is their lowest amount going back to 2015. The KDE developers hope over the next month to drop that to less than 200 bug reports...

Following the pull request from earlier this week that enables Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default for Linux 6.12, a final set of feature updates for the Intel kernel graphics driver have been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Following last week's Vulkan 1.3.294 with pipeline binary extension, Vulkan 1.3.295 is out today and it too introduces a prominent new extension...