Phoronix

With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer...

One of the new features to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the merging of the experimental "Xe" Intel kernel graphics driver. This driver has been in development for quite a while but has reached the state now at which Intel is comfortable with developing it further while in the mainline kernel tree.

Here's a pleasant Christmas present and one I certainly wasn't expecting... Motherboard manufacturer ASRock has announced software for Linux! Well, not any motherboard management/configuration software for their desktop motherboards or anything like that but rather a Linux port of their AI QuickSet software that is intended to help users "experience AI in one click."..

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has announced TUXEDO Control Center 2.1 as their newest update to this software for managing your notebook's vitals from the Linux desktop...

The latest bits of future Intel CPU hardware support being queued for the mainline kernel is adding Intel Idle driver support for the upcoming Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge processors...

One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat's former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years...

For those with Intel Arc Graphics on Linux and wanting to enjoy the game Baldur's Gate 3 thanks to the power of Valve's Steam Play software, an important fix has been merged to Mesa 24.0-devel and set for back-porting to Mesa 23.3. This should take care of rendering issues being reported for Baldur's Gate 3 with Intel graphics on Linux when using the Vulkan renderer...

Following my Linux benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor performance where it ended up being rather disappointing but then with finding great success with the integrated Arc Graphics on Meteor Lake, like I you may be left wondering how much of a role Linux is playing with these results compared to Windows... Well, this article will shed some light on that aspect with looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance on the Acer Swift Go 14 Meteor Lake laptop.

If you were hoping to spend your New Year's Eve compiling a freshly-minted Linux 6.7 stable kernel, you'll need to draft new plans as Linux 6.7 stable won't be released until the following week...

The upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle will be adding mainline support for several low-cost ARM Linux handheld gaming consoles that are suitable for running retro games, older game emulators, and other lightweight software...

Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups...

Ahead of the holidays the open-source developers working on the Godot game engine have released Godot 4.3 Dev 1 as their first test release to this next feature release...

OpenSUSE is now providing builds of openSUSE Tumbleweed and microOS that are making use of systemd-boot as its bootloader rather than GRUB and also leveraging full disk encryption via systemd...

The Bcachefs file-system has landed some additional fixes ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.7 stable release...

Back in January I wrote about Intel working on a Timed I/O driver for Linux with PPS (Pulse Per Second) to help with time synchronization between multiple devices. There hasn't been much external talk about this Timed I/O / PPS functionality while today as we approach the end of the year a new set of Linux kernel patches were posted for wiring up this Intel PPS Generator functionality...

Among the newly-proposed features for Fedora 40 is enabling WiFi MAC address randomization by default to yield better user privacy...

Intel's new Xe kernel graphics driver is set for merging into Linux 6.8 as an experimental option. While it's being added to the next kernel cycle, it's not yet used by default for any existing Intel GPUs and its features have yet to be fully implemented and the performance has yet to be fully optimized. Among the features currently missing is Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support but a patch series posted today aims to address that functionality...

With AI being all the rage these days and each vendor working on getting their wares to market with AI acceleration, besides Intel now having out their Meteor Lake CPUs that feature their Intel AI Boost (NPU), Intel is rather positioned well with their prolific open-source software contributions. One of the AI-related software contributions over the past week has been improvements to the FFmpeg multimedia library's "DNN detect" filter for object detection within videos...

GRUB 2.06 was released back in June of 2021 and today it's finally been succeeded by... GRUB 2.12. This latest GRUB stable release has been a long time coming but it's finally out before the new year and it's packing many features for this widely-used open-source bootloader...

For those with some extra time on your hands around the holidays, the second beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6.0 is now available for testing...

Yesterday I posted the first Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarks that were focused on the CPU capabilities with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Ubuntu Linux compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. The strictly CPU core performance ended up being rather disappointing with the AMD Zen 4 laptop dominating in most cases at similar or better power efficiency. But where things become much more interesting -- and competitive -- with Meteor Lake is on the integrated graphics side now featuring Arc Graphics. The benchmarks today is our first look at the new Meteor Lake Arc Graphics with the Core 7 Ultra 155H while comparing it to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the prior generation Intel integrated graphics.

The first beta of the Qt 6.7 toolkit is now available for some holiday-time testing...

With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel...

Ikey Doherty who is known for his work starting Solus Linus as well as the Budgie desktop while also formerly working on Intel's Clear Linux and other open-source software contributions has most recently been working on his newest endeavour: Serpent OS. A end-of-year development summary has now been posted that outlines the latest work on this Linux distribution...

QEMU 8.2 has been released as the newest update for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

A new version of Sound Open Firmware is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware and development tools. For what began as an Intel open-source project for open-source sound firmware is now seeing ongoing adoption by AMD, MediaTek, and other vendors. Sound Open Firmware 2.8 has been released ahead of the holidays...

It's just not old wired and wireless networking drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel but as part of some winter-time cleaning a set of patches have been posted that would remove much of the remaining SPARC32 support for old 32-bit Sun workstations...

Last week Intel launched their Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" notebook processors. Genuinely very curious about the performance potential under Linux along with various features of these new mobile SoCs like the NPU and integrated Arc Graphics, I bought an Intel Core Ultra laptop on launch-day for carrying out Linux benchmarks. In this first review of Intel Meteor Lake on Linux is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H performs against the common AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as the Zen 4 laptop competition.

The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs...

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems...

As what's likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift...

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the IAA crypto compression driver for allowing users of the Linux kernel's compression API to make use of the Intel Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found with Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids Xeon server processors...

While much of the focus by Linux desktops as we roll into 2024 is polishing off their Wayland support, there does exist a rather innovative display server out there that's been in the works for years: Arcan. Arcan is the open-source project built atop a game engine and provides a display server paired with a real-time multimedia framework for audio and video. Arcan can be used from embedded purposes through full desktop solutions and can also interact with Wayland and X11 as well as embracing VR. Arcan 0.6.3 was released today along with the announcement that they've taken on some funding...

By now you've likely heard how Intel's Gaudi2 accelerator hardware is standing up very well against the NVIDIA competition especially in value. There's nothing new there but an important part to keep in mind -- and where Intel is the hands-down winner -- is the open-source ecosystem with having a fully open-source and upstream Linux kernel accelerator driver as well as their SynapseAI open-source components in user-space. The Gaudi2 open-source kernel driver support is now considered "very stable at this point" with the upstream state fairing well...

Yesterday the initial code for supporting the Alliance For Open Media's Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) was merged for the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

The Nintendo HID open-source driver is being extended with the Linux 6.8 kernel to support the Nintendo Switch Online "NSO" controllers...

Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!..

Shotcut 23.12 debuted this weekend as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editing solution for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems...

With the new Intel 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" processors there is a new feature called the Optimized Power Mode (OPM). This Optimized Power Mode can be enabled via the system BIOS for Emerald Rapids for helping to reduce the CPU power consumption when not running at full utilization. With Intel claiming that up to 110 Watts of server power savings can be conserved when running at 30~40% utilization, I was curious and set out to run my own Optimized Power Mode benchmarks with the Xeon Platinum 8592+ processors. Here is a deep dive on Intel Optimized Power Mode benchmarks.

All the pieces have been aligned that the mainline Linux 6.8 kernel should be able to boot on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC without any out-of-tree patches being necessary...

While Intel Meteor Lake processors only launched last week, Intel Linux engineers have already been busy for some time enabling next-generation Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors...

A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is "gigabyte_waterforce" as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers...

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV's Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won't be too much longer before being upstreamed...

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared a status update on the current state of HDR support for the KDE Plasma desktop...

Linux 6.7-rc6 was released today while the final release of Linux 6.7 is likely to come New Year's weekend and complicating the opening of the Linux 6.8 merge window around the end-of-year holidays...

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced...

While not talked about as much as the AMD open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux, AMD's multimedia stack on Linux continues to be improved upon for supporting new use-cases with AMD-based Linux deployments continuing to come up in the embedded space for all different applications like in-vehicle infotainment systems. The newest AMD video acceleration feature to now be wired up to their open-source Mesa code is enabling region of interest (ROI) encoding functionality...

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver...

A new Long-Term Support version of Cloud Hypervisor was released this week, which is the open-source project originally started by Intel as a cloud-focused and Rust-written VMM that now has wide industry backing including from multiple other CPU vendors...