The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code is now branched that marks an end to this quarter's feature development. Mesa 23.2-devel is now open on Git main in beginning work towards the Q3'2023 open-source user-space graphics driver stack feature release...
Canonical announced today that their kernel livepatching service will now be available for their hardware enablement "HWE" kernels on Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases...
For those with a Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1/convertible laptop, a tablet mode switch driver is set to be merged for Linux 6.4 to properly handle the tablet mode switching support for these devices while running the mainline Linux kernel...
Days after releasing the Intel Media Driver 2023Q1, Intel's software engineers have now released oneVPL 2023Q1 as the updated quarterly release to this video processing library that is part of Intel's open-source oneAPI toolkit...
Servo as the browser engine started at Mozilla but now developed as a Linux Foundation project has been maintaining two separate layout engines and moving forward they hope to be able to focus on the newer "Layout 2020" engine and fill in its missing gaps...
While we are still waiting for the Intel Xe kernel driver to be upstreamed as the modern alternative to the long-used i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, upstream Mesa Git is nearly ready in supporting the Xe kernel driver and its new/changed interfaces...
With Linux 6.3 there is the new AMD P-State EPP driver code for supporting the ACPI Energy Performance Preference (EPP) to further enhance the power efficiency and performance of modern AMD systems on Linux. Last week I ran some benchmarks of AMD EPYC with the new AMD P-State EPP mode while in today's article is a look at the laptop impact with Ryzen Mobile when comparing ACPI CPUFreq, the existing AMD P-State driver, and the new AMD P-State EPP mode and its multiple different preferences.
In addition to releasing the GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card today (unfortunately, no launch day Linux review, still waiting on hardware...), NVIDIA has released as open-source the RTX Remix software for helping to add path tracing support to classic games...
Intel Foundry Services (IFS) has racked up a big win today with Arm over enabling chip designers to make use of Intel's upcoming 18A process for low-power Arm SoCs...
If Mesa 23.1 couldn't get anymore exciting with RADV GPL support enabled by default, more RDNA3 optimizations, continued Zink optimizations, more Intel DG2/Alchemist enhancements, and a load of other features... Support for RadeonSI with the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver has been merged!..
The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts, which is used by at least a once popular Intel Atom powered Android tablet from a decade prior...
KDE Connect is the great software that allows for interfacing between the KDE desktop and your various mobile devices running Android, Plasma Mobile, Apple iOS, or even Sailfish OS. KDE Connect allows easily sharing files and data with your mobile device(s), receiving phone notifications on your desktop, and a lot of other remote/cross-device functionality. The KDE Connect 2.0 initiative that is taking shape this year thanks to full-time development work is going to modernize this open-source solution...
CoreCtrl as the open-source utility for managing your system's performance/vitals and supporting various application profiles has landed in Debian as well as being picked up for easy installation on the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04...
Intel processors should have any CPU microcode updates loaded early during the Linux boot process to avoid various known issues. When "late loading" CPU microcode after the system is up and running, various issues can happen on Intel processors that led them to mark the Linux kernel as tainted under such conditions. Tainting the kernel also happened when late-loading microcode on AMD CPUs but now that's been deemed unnecessary and late-loading CPU microcode on AMD processors is reportedly safe...
For those making use of Mesa's single-file on-disk shader cache, with the upcoming Mesa 23.1 release there will be increased space savings with the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver...
Going back to 2020 Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Key Locker support for Linux for that hardware feature introduced with Tigerlake CPUs. The Key Locker Linux support has been worked on now for nearly three years and finally after a hiatus a new version was sent out after they worked through a significant performance issue now being addressed with forthcoming firmware...
AMD and their partners continue working on bringing up Coreboot for the Ryzen Mobile 7040 Series "Phoenix" support for those very interesting forthcoming mobile processors with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics...
For more than one year and now up to thirteen rounds of patch review, the AMD Pensando Elba SoC support continues in its trek toward the mainline Linux kernel...
Following some minor delays due to additional release candidates, FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE is now officially available as this latest FreeBSD operating system update ahead of FreeBSD 14.0 debuting this summer...
Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the Panfrost open-source Arm Mali graphics driver reverse engineering effort the past half-decade is stepping down as maintainer of this driver as part of this also being her last day at Collabora...
NVIDIA launched their SHIELD "Thunderstrike" gaming controller back in 2017 and now in 2023 they are working to upstream their HD driver support for it...
Back in 2021 saw work on CPU cluster-aware scheduling by HiSilicon engineers for Arm processors as well as Intel engineers with a focus on their Jacobsville platform being comprised of clusters of Atom cores. That x86 cluster-aware scheduling was enabled for capable Intel processors while now two years later is being extended for AMD processors...
Just before Christmas Meson 1.0 was released for this widely-used, open-source software build system. Out today is Meson 1.1 as the newest feature update...
In time for the upcoming Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has enabled the graphics pipeline library "GPL" support by default with the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver...
While AMD Zen 4 "Dragon Range" and "Phoenix" laptops are imminent, for those using an older AMD Picasso laptop design from 2019, there are some new Linux fixes on the way for enhancing that older Zen+ experience...
The Intel Media Driver 2023Q1 has been published as the newest feature release for Intel's open-source video acceleration driver providing VA-API support across generations of their integrated graphics as well as newer discrete graphics...
Longtime X.Org release wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle spent some of his Easter working out new releases of seldom-touched X.Org graphics/display drivers...
Going along with other Lunar Lake enablement work that has already been started for the upstream Linux kernel, the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle will see HD audio support enabled for this successor to Arrow Lake...
The Btrfs scrub code that is used for going through file-system data/metadata to verify checksums and repairing damaged blocks is seeing some improvements come Linux 6.4...
While for many months now Intel's open-source driver engineers have been busy getting Meteor Lake Linux support squared away and there has even been some Lunar Lake activity for the Linux kernel going back to 2021, it looks now like their Arrow Lake enablement will be getting underway...
Following this week's drm-intel-gt-next pull with more Meteor Lake enablement and other new feature code, a final batch of drm-intel-next feature updates were also submitted to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel merge window...
Cloud Hypervisor 31 was released this week as the Rust-written VMM started by Intel that runs atop Linux KVM and Microsoft MSHV while these days is a Linux Foundation project receiving regular contributions from not only Intel and Microsoft but also Tencent, Arm, and other players...
Another tardy Mesa stable release is now available for those wanting to run the latest open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration code on your Linux systems...
In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...
As the latest effort in the quest of bringing Rust programming language usage to the Linux kernel, sent out on Thursday were initial patches for bringing Rust infrastructure to the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) framework within the media subsystem...
While going back a year there has been "GFX940" open-source driver work happening within the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel drivers and the like, only this week was support merged for GFX940 into Mesa...
Earlier this week Intel sent out AMX-COMPLEX support for the GCC compiler as a new instruction set extension for Xeon Scalable Granite Rapids. That enablement work was already merged for the imminent GCC 13 release while now AMX-COMPLEX support has also been added to GNU Binutils...
This week Intel formally debuted its oneAPI 2023.1 Tools package that contains the collection of various compilers, libraries, debugging tools, and related open-source offerings like OSPRay Studio and Embree 4.0...