Phoronix

The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there's been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February...

In addition to the many OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver improvements building up for Mesa 24.0, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has also been preparing some video acceleration improvements for this next quarterly release...

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations...

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration...

A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine's Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement...

The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver...

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more...

With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here's a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.

As noted a few weeks back, NVIDIA is working to add OpenACC support to the upstream LLVM Clang compiler for this parallel computing standard. Today that work began landing in LLVM/Clang's development codebase...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has added support for the protected memory feature available with Vulkan 1.1+...

An initial set of drm-misc-next changes has been sent out today to DRM-Next of the very first feature patches to begin queuing until the Linux 6.8 merge window opens up around the start of the new year...

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven't yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There's also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors...

For those Ubuntu Linux users enjoying the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for having the very latest kernel stable point releases or being able to test daily Git kernel builds with ease or weekly RCs, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA returned this week after a month of downtime...

Earlier this week Intel compiler engineers posted patches enabling Intel APX NDD support for the GCC compiler as the "New Data Destination" feature of the Advanced Performance Extensions. Those engineers are ending out their week by posting patches for enabling APX PPX for GCC, the new Push-Pop Acceleration of this forthcoming ISA addition...

Valve has released SteamOS 3.5.5 to its stable channel for Steam Deck users that brings Steam Deck OLED device support, HDR display settings if supported by the external display, the default color rendering for Steam Deck LCD now emulates the sRGB color gamut, and many other changes...

Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available, Noctua recently introduced the new NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 heatsinks. In addition to working with the Threadripper 7000 series, these CPUs fit as well for Socket SP6 introduced with the new AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. Here is a look at the cooling performance of these new Noctua TR5-SP6 heatsinks on AMD EPYC.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has announced they've developed open-source Linux kernel driver support for the H.264 video encoder found with Allwinner V3, V3s, and S3 SoCs...

As was expected but now made official: this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel is Linux 6.6...

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands...

Intel has released OpenVINO 2023.2 as the newest version of their open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues in its never-ending quest for maximizing deep learning performance and efficiency while continuing to expand in its model support and features...

Going back to May 2022, AMD Linux graphics driver engineers were working on AMDGPU driver patches to enable a new Light System DMA "LSDMA" IP block. Since then we haven't heard much about LSDMA until some new patches surfaced yesterday for optionally enabling the LSDMA ring mode for the AMDGPU kernel driver...

Intel has rolled out a new quarterly update to QATlib, its QuickAssist Technology library for Linux systems to enjoy hardware acceleration of various crypto and compression algorithms on QAT Gen 4 hardware...

Dimitri John Ledkov of the Ubuntu kernel team has written about some of the improvements made for the default kernel build on Ubuntu 23.10. Ubuntu's Linux kernel build is now using much less disk space, lower RAM use, and much faster initrd generation...

Mesa 23.3 is gearing up for release in a week or two while out now is Mesa 23.3-rc4 for the latest weekly release candidate to this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) continuing to prove popular mot only for end-users and independent developers but within organizations as well for having easy access to a Linux environment from the confines of Windows 11, Microsoft has added new enterprise-focused security options for WSL...

Intel has released a new version of ISPC, their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler. The ISPC 1.22 release is clocking in a few percent faster across the board as with their release builds they are now making use of LLVM Clang's link-time optimizations (LTO) for speeding up the binaries...

A change proposal currently undergoing discussion for Fedora 40 would change their toolchain's (BFD) linker to error out on potential security issues. Currently BFD is emitting warnings on potential security problems but the F40 proposal is to instead error out so the program being built will fail to link when hitting recognized security issues...

For those in the market for an AMD Ryzen 7040 series (Zen 4) laptop, the Framework 13 laptop is a great option for those wanting a Linux-friendly device and is a rare breed in being a completely upgradeable laptop similar to Framework's Intel laptop models. I've been testing out the Framework Laptop 13 the past month and after a BIOS update has been working out wonderfully on Linux.

The GNOME GTK toolkit is introducing support for graphics offloading within the toolkit. This new GTK "GraphicsOffload" support is Wayland-only at this time and not working either for non-Linux platforms...

A new feature coming to next-generation Intel graphics display hardware has been revealed in new open-source Linux graphics driver patches: CMRR as an extension of the existing adaptive-sync variable rate refresh (VRR) functionality...

As part of their work on enabling Advanced Performance Extensions, Intel compiler engineers today posted a set of GNU Compiler Collection patches for enabling the APX NDD...

Thanks to prolific Mesa RADV contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team, a fix is on the way for addressing various issues with Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 games running on Linux...

The newest Wine Wayland driver code to be merged is improved HiDPI support...

Hours after writing about Microsoft's Direct3D 12 back-end for Mesa seeing OpenGL 4.4 support, the in-review OpenGL 4.5 code mentioned in that article happened to land in Mesa...

While not as popular as Rust or other languages these days, for COBOL enthusiasts and those continuing to maintain codebases in this 50's programming language, the out-of-tree GCC COBOL compiler support continues to be worked on in late 2023...

The latest software offering announced today by Canonical with an enterprise focus and their hopes of driving new Ubuntu Pro and support subscriptions is MicroCloud. Their MicroCloud software aims to make it easy to deploy a private cloud that is a "fully functional cloud in minutes" atop Ubuntu Linux...

From SC23 going on in Denver, the PCI-SIG team sent out a news release that they have announced the naming for their next-generation PCI Express cabling... CopprLink...

On 14 December is the previously-announced launch of 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" and Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors via a webcast from NASDAQ that Intel is promoting as the "AI Everywhere" event. AMD meanwhile recently announced an "Advancing AI" event for the week prior. While details on the AMD Advancing AI event are light, it's all the more interesting now with AMD teasing open standards and open-source around the event...

Intel has released new CPU microcode this morning for mitigating a new CPU security vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00950). This new microcode drop also fixes various functional issues on recent generations of Intel processors...

Just two weeks since Fwupd 1.9.7 was released, Fwupd 1.9.8 is now available for this open-source solution that facilities firmware updating on Linux systems for system firmware as well as various devices/peripherals...

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release and in turn also marking the Netplan 1.0 release...

It was just last week that Microsoft got OpenGL 4.3 implemented over Direct3D 12 for use in cases where Windows lacks a native OpenGL driver or for use under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSLg). After implementing a few more GL extensions atop D3D12, Microsoft has now got OpenGL 4.4 in Mesa running on Direct3D...

Merged overnight to Mesa 24.0 is the Rust-written NAK compiler back-end for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVK Vulkan driver...

After a one week delay, Blender 4.0 is now available as the latest major update to this leading open-source and cross platform 3D modeling software...

With newly-merged optimizations to Mesa 24.0-devel, the Intel shader compiler back-end is seeing its scheduling code execute around 30% faster. This big speed-up comes due to overhauling how they store pass information and reusing that for multiple pre-RA scheduling modes...

AMD is announcing this morning in Bavaria (SPS 23 in Nurnberg) the Ryzen Embedded 7000 series processors, the latest addition to the Zen 4 family. The Ryzen Embedded 7000 Series are socketed CPUs intended for various embedded and edge applications in the 60~105 Watt space.

Since the Linux 6.5 kernel this summer the SLAB allocator has been officially deprecated. This followed the demise of SLOB and trying to get all Linux users over to the SLUB allocator. Patches have now been posted for stripping out the SLAB allocator for good from the mainline kernel...

Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!..

The Aurora supercomputer originally was supposed to be completed by Intel and Cray/HPE for the Argonne National Laboratory back in 2018. Now at the end of 2023, it's made its first debut on the TOP500 list... But only as a partial deployment and is coming in at spot number two...