Phoronix

After looking yesterday at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of 2023, here is a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the more than 2,780 original news articles authored on Phoronix this calendar year...

Eric Engestrom has issued an on-time bi-weekly point release for the Mesa 3D graphics drivers today principally composed of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers commonly used by the Linux desktop...

One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.

Over the course of 2023 I authored 180 Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles, not to mention the thousands of original open-source/Linux news items. As we are about to hit the end of 2023, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of the year...

As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate...

Nobara 39 was released today as this modified Fedora Linux downstream that focuses on adding user-friendly fixes and various gamer/enthusiast type desktop optimizations...

With all of my initial Intel Core Ultra 7 155H benchmarking since last week from the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance to the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance it was at the Linux 6.7 kernel defaults / OS defaults. But for those wanting to push the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H further for better performance or conversely wanting to extend the battery life further for devices like the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) can be adjusted. Here's a look at the sometimes significant difference to power and performance when adjusting the Intel Meteor Lake CPU between the default balanced performance mode and the alternative power saver and performance modes.

One of the big milestones we are looking forward to in 2024 is the introduction of AMD Zen 5 processors. AMD Linux engineers have in recent months begun getting ready for those next-generation processors that look like will be Family 26 (1Ah) processors. We've been seeing more of the AMD "1Ah" patches and some more were posted today for some post-Christmas excitement before the new year...

Similar to the long-worked-on GNOME dynamic triple buffering that is applied when the (most commonly integrated) graphics fall behind schedule in rendering the desktop, a merge request for KDE's KWin compositor has also seen similar work in this area for helping the iGPU catch-up in rendering via a "triple buffering" implementation...

Intel Linux engineers continue eagerly working on the Compute Express Link (CXL) code for the Linux kernel with more server hardware coming to market supporting this high-speed open standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections...

As part of AMD's Platform Management Framework (PMF) and working on new Ryzen features like the Smart PC Solutions Builder, a set of patches are queued up ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle support for policy binary support with the PMF driver...

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation...

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors...

Along with all of the other ongoing Intel Arrow Lake processor/platform enablement, the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel will have the sound driver support ready for landing...

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to those celebrating any end-of-year holidays. In case you missed last month's cyber week special for a discounted rate on going ad-free, native dark mode, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits, it's back for Christmas week...

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations...

Intel's open-source Linux drivers for OpenGL (Iris) and Vulkan (ANV) this week for Mesa 24.0 received support for dual-SIMD8 dispatch on Gen12 graphics (Tigerlake) and newer...

While the Linux 6.7 release is being pushed back by one week due to the holidays and in turn the Linux 6.8 merge window not officially opening until 8 January, some pull requests do end up getting submitted early. The 1-wire bus driver changes for Linux 6.8 were sent out this week and most notably includes adding the AMD AXI 1-wire host driver...

With the Linux 6.7 kernel there is now KVM virtualization support for LoongArch CPUs. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, that KVM support is being further extended for these RISC-V-inspired and MIPS64-derived Chinese processors...

New upstream Linux kernel releases are typically issued on Sunday evenings (US time) but Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.7-rc7 a day early in preparations for Christmas Eve festivities...

It's been two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.25 and now just ahead of Christmas there is Enlightenment 0.26 released by Carsten Haitzler...

Following discussions with upstream developers, LLVM is changing its versioning as part of the branch creation process to better distinguish mainline development builds of LLVM against those from stable (or soon to be stable) release branches...

With a set of input driver patches set to be merged today for the Linux 6.7-rc6 kernel, the XPad driver is adding support for Razer's Wolverine V2 Xbox controller...

This week brought the second beta of KDE Plasma 6.0 along with KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks updates too. The holidays haven't resulted in KDE development slowing down too much with still a number of bug fixes being merged this week and other minor enhancements...

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager...

For those still relying on GNU Autoconf for generating configure scripts for building/installing/packaging software rather than more modern alternatives like CMake and Meson, Autoconf 2.72 is out today as a nice holiday treat...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 9.0 is now available for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

In helping to guide Intel's open-source interests in 2024, the company is hosting an Open-Source Community Survey. Intel is looking for feedback from open-source developers and other community stakeholders about your principal interests and concerns...

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.