Phoronix

Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area...

Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year...

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series...

For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable...

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1'2024...

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi...

With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel's open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application...

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors...

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver...

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD's first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support...

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as a modern Linux storage solution that leverages the Rust programming language and built atop the proven XFS file-system and LVM. Stratis continues to strive for ZFS and Btrfs like functionality although its use in the wild still seems rather limited...

The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed...

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window...

Since AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and working to broaden the portfolio of offerings for the data center, more AMD-Xilinx drivers have been working their way toward the mainline Linux kernel. There's been upstreaming efforts such as the Versal EDAC driver, generating DeviceTree nodes for PCI devices, Versal watchdog driver, QDMA driver, CDX bus support, and more. The latest driver working its way toward the mainline kernel from AMD is the AXI 1-wire driver...

The VKMS driver as a virtual kernel mode-setting solution as a software-only implementation of KMS for use with primarily headless Linux systems continues tacking on more features. Maira Canal and Melissa Wen presented last week at XDC 2023 on the VKMS driver that continues proving very useful for headless platforms as well as for testing purposes...

As yet another open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver change ahead of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 code branching and feature freeze is Vulkan VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix support with the RADV driver for RDNA3 hardware and newer using the GPU's Wavefront Mixed-precision Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) functionality...

As we approach the end of 2023, sadly, the real-time kernel "PREEMPT_RT" support still hasn't been mainlined... The main blocker pending is still the ongoing work around non-blocking consoles / threaded console handling to then allow the few dozen remaining out-of-tree RT kernel patches to be merged. The good news is that when the PREEMPT_RT support is ready for mainline, it looks like the RISC-V architecture support will also be real-time friendly too...

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been around for a decade since the Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics card days while finally the OpenGL renderer string is being changed to reflect "RadeonSI" as the name of the driver in use...

Given recent talk of upstream Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels likely being reduced from six to two year support windows moving forward, Canonical today decided to re-affirm their support for ten years of support with Ubuntu Long Term Support versions...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed initial support for GFX11.5 "RDNA3 refresh" graphics within the RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming Mesa 23.3...

While Meteor Lake isn't shipping until December, Intel's open-source Linux engineers for months have already been working on 15th Gen Arrow Lake (as well as Lunar Lake, among their other processor lines) for getting the driver support in order. The latest early hardware enablement to talk about is the initial Arrow Lake S support coming to their video acceleration drivers...

In addition to old and unmaintained Ethernet driver code set for removal, there is an effort underway to clear out some obsolete and orphaned WiFi drivers from the Linux kernel...

Canonical continues investing in Mir as their Wayland compositor and set of platform abstraction interfaces to make it easier for IoT and other "smart" devices to run atop Ubuntu Core. Most recently the Mir developers have been working to partially re-architect their graphics platform handling to better handle multiple GPU/display devices...

Ahead of the official planned announcement for Tuesday, the Mozilla Firefox 119.0 release binaries have been published for this monthly feature update...

While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn't delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.

While most hardware vendors are relying on LLVM when it comes to offloading compute work to GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, and similar heterogeneous compute environments, right now each vendor is basically creating their own LLVM offloading run-time among a lot of other duplicated -- and often downstream only -- code. The new "llvm/offload" project hopes to lead to better collaboration in this area...

Following an FCV optimization for the latest Intel graphics hardware, ASTC LDR emulation, some still-pending Vulkan sparse support for ANV atop the existing i915 driver, and other recent Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver optimizations, another optimization was just merged into Mesa 23.3...

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver within Mesa has long been focused on reverse engineering and supporting Vivante graphics IP found in various SoCs. That driver has worked out well for open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics while more recently Etnaviv has begun tackling Vivante neural processing unit (NPU) support that is beginning to be found in various SoCs...

After the Raspberry Pi 5 was excitingly announced a few weeks ago, Eben Upton shared today that ramping up the production has gone better than initially anticipated and that these AArch64 single board computers are beginning to ship to customers...

Linus Torvalds today released the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.6 while is hoping to release the stable kernel version next weekend...

For those that happen to have QLogic 10Gb PCIe Ethernet adapters, the mainline Linux kernel is planning to remove this driver from the kernel source tree unless any active users step-up...

In addition to working on the likes of the Milk-V Duo and high-end Pioneer board, Milk-V has now announced the "Oasis" as a forthcoming mini-ITX RISC-V board that will feature 16 cores and up to 64GB of LPDDR5 system memory...

Linux sound patches queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle are preparing for the upcoming introduction of the new "Xe" DRM kernel graphics driver...

AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver...

Zlib-ng 2.1.4 was released this week as the newest version of this Zlib data compression library intended for "next generation" uses. Zlib-ng continues having a lower barrier for new contributions and optimizations than the upstream Zlib repository itself to allow for it to more rapidly evolve on today's systems...

Libreboot 20231021 was published for testing today as the newest Coreboot downstream focused on providing only fully free software support for system firmware with more stringent open-source requirements than Coreboot itself...

An Intel engineer on Friday posted a set of Linux kernel patches that are working to refine the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation handling for the Linux kernel to better protect some kernel data and also some very subtle performance benefits...

Ever since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 last month, this open-source community software project for enhancing overclocking controls under Linux has been living up to the "release early, release often" mantra. Out today is TuxClocker 1.2...

FreeBSD 14.0 is preparing for release in early November as a big update to this leading BSD operating system. It's going to be a great release and Friday's FreeBSD 14.0-RC2 milestone landed some last minute updates...

Back in September GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted how Linux terminal emulators have the potential of being much faster based on his experiments. While at the time he didn't plan to pursue it further, in the weeks since he's been making enhancements to GNOME's VTE code that is used by GNOME Console and other apps...

Thursday marked the 18th birthday of the Geany open-source text editor / lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) project. In celebrating Geany turning 18, the Geany 2.0 release was made available. Geany 2.0 continues to strive toward the project goal of being a fast and easy to use text editor for coding...

With the newest AMD Ryzen 7040 series laptops there is "Ryzen AI" as a dedicated AI engine based on Xilinx IP to help accelerate machine learning with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. Sadly though this Ryzen AI with their new Zen 4 laptops is only supported under Microsoft Windows at this point. But it could change with sufficient customer interest...

Raptor Computing Systems as the company behind the open-source friendly, POWER-based Talos II server and Blackbird microATX desktop has continued leveraging POWER9 given the binary blobs and challenging state around POWER10. But looking ahead to next year it looks like they'll be debuting some new hardware platforms...

As shown already the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U works out well on Linux and is very speedy as shown with that prior benchmarking on Linux 6.3, but for those moving to Linux 6.5 or newer the performance and power efficiency is even better. Like for those moving to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.5, there are some nice performance gains to find with this laptop -- similar to the experience seen with various AMD Ryzen desktops on the new kernel.

System76 engineers working on their COSMIC desktop environment for their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution continue to be quite busy working on this Rust-written desktop code...

Vulkan 1.3.269 released this morning with new extensions from Arm and NVIDIA...

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL "Rusticl" driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D's Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers...

For going along with the initial GFX11.5 kernel support that is set to be introduced in Linux 6.7 along with other portions of new AMD Radeon graphics IP enablement, this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release will also bring initial GFX11.5 graphics support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Lutris 0.5.14 is out today as the newest feature update to this Python-written open-source solution for managing your games on Linux whether they be native titles or via Steam Play / Wine as well as integrating into popular gaming services like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and EA App. With Lutris 0.5.14 this centralized Linux game launcher has picked up some additional capabilities...