Phoronix

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...

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.27 as the newest feature update to this Rust-written, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils as the common set of utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms...

On Friday more AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes were submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle by way of DRM-Next. We're nearing the end of feature work to DRM-Next before the Linux 6.11 merge window begins in mid-July while this latest AMD pull request continues preparing for upcoming RDNA4 graphics hardware among other changes...

Red Hat engineer Leonardo Bras has laid out a proposal for QPWs, or "Queue PerCPU Work", as a better means of handling per-CPU operations within the Linux kernel especially for real-time (RT) workloads...

Flathub as the centralized repository for serving Flatpak sandboxed Linux applications crossed the threshold this weekend of serving more than two billion downloads...

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

Merged on Friday to LLVM 19 Git is a generic MLIR to SPIR-V pass for lowering the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation down into SPIR-V as the intermediate representation consumed by OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan drivers...

GNOME developers continue to be very busy with a variety of initiatives thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) financing as well as other general development efforts as they work their way toward GNOME 47 in September...

Following this week's great KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop release, developers have been fixing some minor bugs and other issues that were raised by early users of this updated open-source Qt6-powered desktop...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source/Linux graphics driver team has submitted a merge request to "massively" improve the OpenGL glReadPixels performance within the common Mesa state tracker...

While more software piles on AI features these days, today's release of the Darktable 4.8 RAW photography software has removed one of its AI features after realizing it only delivers mediocre quality...

VKD3D-Proton 2.13 is now available as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API translation later that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for accelerating D3D12 Windows games on Linux...

With some Linux users not liking the recently showcased new Linux "Blue Screen of Death" for kernel panics, Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas who has been one of those involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure showed that it can also be a "black screen of death" if so desired...

Earlier this week was a proposal for creating a new Mesa legacy driver branch for clearing out older OpenGL drivers like the ATI R300, AMD R600, Lima, Nouveau NV30, and other older GPU drivers. However, other upstream Mesa developers aren't convinced by the proposal...

Cloud Hypervisor 40.0 is out today for this open-source Rust-written VMM that started off as an Intel software project and evolved into a multi-vendor initiative with backing from the likes of Microsoft, Arm, AMD, and others for a cloud-focused, security-critical virtualization hypervisor...

Intel software engineers have been upstreaming the Lunar Lake support for Linux a number of months already and the basics appear in good shape, aside from the Xe2 graphics enablement being an ongoing matter. Much of the rest of the core functionality has appeared to be in good shape ahead of Lunar Lake laptops launching in Q3, but it seems there have been a few missing power management related bits...

Newly merged patches for Mesa 24.2 slightly enhance the default out-of-the-box build experience for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on POWER/PowerPC platforms...

The Intel Xe driver is working on supporting PMT functionality with a new set of patches that may be mainlined for Linux v6.11~6.12...

While not talked about as much as the likes of the Intel Gaudi accelerators with their upstream Habana Labs kernel driver or the AMD Instinct MI300 series with their open-source upstream support too, back in 2022 Qualcomm did post an open-source kernel driver for their Cloud AI accelerator. That was followed by an open-source compiler and user-space stack and in turn the QAIC driver was upstreamed into the accelerator (accel) subsystem last year with Linux 6.4...

Intel on Wednesday released version 1.5 of their Linux NPU driver, their user-space driver component for Linux systems in enabling the neural processing unit found with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors and newer. This goes along with their upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for allowing a full open-source solution for AI workloads with the likes of OpenVINO...

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support...

In addition to Mutter seeing Wayland DRM lease protocol support merged, another long-in-development patch series hit GNOME Shell this morning: accent color support!..

Merged today into GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol to allow for nice virtual reality (VR) headset support for GNOME on Wayland...

It was just a few months back that Intel introduced a Gaudi "2C" variant of Gaudi2 to their open-source Linux driver. This variant might be for some export model or otherwise a hyperscaler/customer-specific revision or something along those lines. Now appearing within new Habana Labs driver patches for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel are patches for a new Gaudi 2D variant...

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 12 series open-source compiler that was introduced as stable in 2022, GCC 12.4 is out today as the newest bug fix release...

Another weeks worth of random DRM-Misc-Next changes have been queued ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 merge window...

Theseus Ship is the X11/Wayland compositor previously known as KWinFT developed by Roman Gilg as a fork of KDE Plasma's KWin. Pulling in patches from KWin in this week's KDE Plasma 6.1 release, Theseus Ship 6.1 is now available...

Zhaoxin Shijidadao CPU support was upstreamed today into the GCC 15 compiler codebase. Zhaoxin as a reminder is the joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government for creating x86/x86_64-compatible processors for the Chinese market...

As written about this morning, AMD announced ROCm 6.1.3 with multi-GPU support, beta support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot compatibility, and TensorFlow framework qualification support. The upstream ROCm code on GitHub as of writing continues pointing only to the prior ROCm 6.1.2 software but there is now a Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver offering up ROCm 6.1.3...

Building off the Xe2 foundation in place for the Lunar Lake integrated graphics, more recently Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have begun pushing out code focused on enabling the Xe2-based Battlemage discrete GPUs as the successor to the DG2/Alchemist hardware. That enablement work remains ongoing and with the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle the important fundamental milestone is being crossed of actually being able to drive a connected display/monitor by a Battlemage GPU...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has issued a proposal for creating a new legacy branch for older/less-maintained Gallium3D drivers...

While it looked like all of the Intel Lunar Lake support was wrapped up with the first of these next-gen Core Ultra laptops set to debut next quarter and the Panther Lake bring-up for Linux has begun, it looks like there may be some stragglers still around Lunar Lake. Sent out today was the patch series enabling DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator) support for these upcoming mobile SoCs...

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors...

AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements...

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions...

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory...

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion...

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins...

Framework Computer Inc announced today that they have been working with DeepComputing on a partner-developed RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13...

Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February...

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey...