Phoronix

QEMU 8.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.1-rc2 right on time as the newest weekly test candidate for Mesa 23.1 as this quarter's feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers...

The long-awaited port of the GIMP image manipulation program to the GTK3 toolkit is now declared "officially finished"...

For those wondering how the NVIDIA Linux gaming/GPU performance is looking relative to Windows 11, here are some benchmarks using the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. Both NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards were tested on Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 while primarily focusing on games making use of Valve's Steam Play to reflect current Linux gaming trends as well as featuring some other cross-platform GPU accelerated software.

Linux kernel developers are preparing for the first upgrade to its Rust toolchain since the Rust code initially merged in Linux 6.1...

The upstream, open-source Nouveau DRM kernel driver working to make use of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" will ideally lead to more punctual new hardware support, hopefully overcome the power management / re-clocking challenges that have plagued the driver for years with very low performance, and other current limitations. But it will also lead to more NVIDIA GPU firmware files in the linux-firmware tree and increased bloat...

AMD has published AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 as their first official open-source Vulkan driver update for the quarter that for Linux users serves as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver or the code bundled up into their Radeon Software packaged driver...

While the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine only shipped at the start of March, there are already plans underway for some renderer upgrades that will be part of the upcoming Godot 4.1 engine upgrade...

As expected following the GCC 13 release branching this week, the first release candidate of what will be the premiere GCC 13.1 stable release is now available...

The Hero C Compiler "HCC" wants to make it easy to compile C code to run on GPUs by compiling common C11 code and turning it into SPIR-V modules that can then be consumed by GPUs with Vulkan support...

Wasmer as the open-source project focused on providing a "universal WebAssembly runtime" that supports a variety of platforms and architectures is out today with a new feature release...

OpenCL 3.0.14 has been released that has a few minor fixes/corrections plus one prominent new extension: cl_khr_command_buffer_multi_device...

Joshua Strobl and original Solus project founder Ikey Doherty are both becoming re-involved with the Solus Linux distribution and moving ahead will be built off the SerpentOS project that Ikey has been independently working on the past few years...

Fedora 38 has been released today after meeting its early release target...

Libuv as the cross-platform asynchronous I/O library that is used by the likes of Node.js, Julia, and other software packages now has support for making use of IO_uring on Linux...

For weeks we have been eager to learn more about AMD openSIL that will formally be announced at the OCP Prague event later this week. In anticipation of that event, AMD last week revealed the initial details around this open-source firmware push...

Intel's one-year-old merge request for introducing VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library support to their open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has finally been merged for Mesa 23.2...

AMD has released AOMP 17.0-1 as the newest version of this open-source compiler focused on providing the latest OpenMP offloading support for Radeon and Instinct accelerator products...

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance JVM implementation previously developed as IBM J9...

Intel's open-source OpenGL "Iris" and Vulkan "ANV" Linux drivers are now part of the auto-generated set of drivers set to be built for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) when compiling this code inside Mesa...

A change merged today for the Mesa 23.2 graphics driver stack benefits video transcoding performance for new Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics cards...

Valve and CodeWeavers have made available Proton 8.0-1 as their newest version of this downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

Back in 2019 Valve developers introduced the ACO compiler back-end within Mesa for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler has been instrumental in helping RADV perform very well for Linux gaming both with Vulkan native titles as well as games going the route of DirectX to Vulkan via DXVK and VKD3D with Proton (Steam Play). On and off there's been talk and work towards bringing ACO to RadeonSI Gallium3D for OpenGL while now there is some new work on this front...

The GNU Compiler Collection 13 codebase has no more P1 bugs, which are regressions of the highest priority, and as such the GCC 13 codebase was branched today with plans of issuing GCC 13.1-rc1 likely in the next day and hopefully releasing GCC 13.1 as the first stable release of the GCC 13 series next week...

With the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, several Phoronix Premium supporters expressed interest in seeing how well the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance compared for this Zen 4 3D V-Cache processor. Given those requests, here are some CPU/system benchmarks looking at the performance of Windows 11 Professional against Ubuntu 23.04 in its near-final state on the 7800X3D desktop.

Moore Threads was established in 2020 to create domestic GPU solutions in China with their first products having been announced last year. Most of the talk around Moore Threads "MThreads" GPUs have been for Windows but they are working on Linux support to at least some extent...

In addition to Linux 6.4 bringing some early work around the Apple M2 device support that isn't yet ready for end-users but begins laying the foundation for supporting the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini, another set of Apple changes have now been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle...

It was just four years ago in Ubuntu 19.10 that Ubuntu's desktop installer added OpenZFS support for carrying out root file-system installations atop this ZFS file-system. Since then the Canonical/Ubuntu interest has waned. Ahead of the Ubuntu 23.04 release this week, I tried out the Ubuntu Lunar Lobster daily snapshot this weekend to find the OpenZFS install support with Ubuntu's new desktop installer to still be missing...

Linux 6.3-rc7 was just released and if the next week remains calm, it would mean that Linux 6.3 is shipping next weekend...

While we are basically past the cut-off of new feature material to into DRM-Next that wants to be part of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window, this week AMD sent in a fixes-oriented set of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver updates that does include some minor feature updates...

Sent in this morning for Linux 6.3 is a Linux CPU scheduler fix to deal with an imbalancing issue that's been present in the mainline kernel since a scheduler rework that landed back in late 2019...

Microsoft has published its latest CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230407 Linux distribution images this weekend as their in-house open-source OS that is used for a variety of purposes, mostly around Azure infrastructure...

Last October Google engineers decided they would deprecate JPEG-XL support in Chrome over some debated rationale for the move. Even amid the community uproar they went ahead to drop the JPEG-XL support. The Free Software Foundation has finally commented on the matter...

The digiKam 8.0 open-source professional photo management software has been released. The digiKam 8.0 release brings a host of new features and improvements, including ongoing work of porting over to the Qt6 toolkit...

LXQt 1.3 was just released as the newest version of this lightweight Qt-based desktop environment...

Being worked on for a while has been Linux kernel patches to speed boot times by allowing the parallel bring-up of CPU cores. There were AMD boot issues since worked around and the patches gone through multiple revisions for helping with Linux kernel boot times. Those patches continue to be improved upon and yesterday saw a reworked patch series posted...

OpenZFS 2.1.10 is out as the latest update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

The HP Elite 8200 was once popular and very common among workplaces and can still be found used/refurbished for a little more than $100 for this small form factor PC. Libreboot has now added support for the HP Elite 8200 as its newest desktop port for this Intel Sandy Bridge era system...

Following this week's Mesa 23.1 feature freeze and code branching, Eric Engestrom on Friday night published Mesa 23.1-rc1...

Plasma 6.0 development continues happening at full-speed and exciting this week were landing of some improvements around KWin's multi-GPU infrastructure to benefit Intel and AMD Radeon graphics...

Wine 8.6 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

If you have been running a Linux 6.3-based kernel or later Linux 6.2 point release and have encountered your HDMI audio breaking when making use of Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 hardware, a fix is on the way...

Open-source fans, rejoice, the most exciting thing I have read all week or perhaps the month: "AMD is committed to open-source software and is now expanding into the various firmware domains with the re-architecture of its x86 AGESA FW stack - designed with UEFI as the host firmware that prevented scaling, to other host firmware solutions such as coreboot, oreboot, FortiBIOS, Project Mu and others. A newer, open architecture that potentially allows for reduced attack surface, and perceivably infinite scalability is now available as a Proof-of-Concept, within the open-source community for evaluation, called the AMD openSIL – Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library."..

There is two weeks to go until the Linux 6.3 stable kernel is released, which could drag out to three weeks if last minute issues come about in the kernel. But given all the material queuing via the many "-next" code branches, we already have a good idea for many of the features in store for Linux 6.4...

Landing today in Mesa 23.2-devel is support for big.LITTLE CPU detection or more broadly hybrid CPU core detection where little cores (e.g. E cores) are defined as having less than 50% the capacity of the largest CPU core on the system. This is done since Mesa's OpenGL threading is now being disabled for small hybrid processors...

Mesa 23.1 enables RadeonSI Rusticl support while for next quarter's Mesa 23.2, which just started development, there is already a big ticket item for Rusticl: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle is being extended to support new Ambient Color Sensor "ACS" functionality...

The much anticipated Fedora 38 is cleared for releasing on Tuesday. There are no delays with the Fedora 38 cycle and in fact hitting their "early target date" for shipping on 18 April...

As part of Intel's ongoing Linux support preparations for next year's Sierra Forest processors that will feature up to 144 Xeon E cores per socket, the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver support is set to be added for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle...

Libreboot is the downstream of Coreboot focused on having fully open-source / free software replacements to proprietary BIOS/firmware on x86 and ARM systems. Out today is Libreboot 20230413 as the latest step forward for the project...