Phoronix

GNOME developers continue to be very busy with a variety of initiatives thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) financing as well as other general development efforts as they work their way toward GNOME 47 in September...

Following this week's great KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop release, developers have been fixing some minor bugs and other issues that were raised by early users of this updated open-source Qt6-powered desktop...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source/Linux graphics driver team has submitted a merge request to "massively" improve the OpenGL glReadPixels performance within the common Mesa state tracker...

While more software piles on AI features these days, today's release of the Darktable 4.8 RAW photography software has removed one of its AI features after realizing it only delivers mediocre quality...

VKD3D-Proton 2.13 is now available as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API translation later that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for accelerating D3D12 Windows games on Linux...

With some Linux users not liking the recently showcased new Linux "Blue Screen of Death" for kernel panics, Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas who has been one of those involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure showed that it can also be a "black screen of death" if so desired...

Earlier this week was a proposal for creating a new Mesa legacy driver branch for clearing out older OpenGL drivers like the ATI R300, AMD R600, Lima, Nouveau NV30, and other older GPU drivers. However, other upstream Mesa developers aren't convinced by the proposal...

Cloud Hypervisor 40.0 is out today for this open-source Rust-written VMM that started off as an Intel software project and evolved into a multi-vendor initiative with backing from the likes of Microsoft, Arm, AMD, and others for a cloud-focused, security-critical virtualization hypervisor...

Intel software engineers have been upstreaming the Lunar Lake support for Linux a number of months already and the basics appear in good shape, aside from the Xe2 graphics enablement being an ongoing matter. Much of the rest of the core functionality has appeared to be in good shape ahead of Lunar Lake laptops launching in Q3, but it seems there have been a few missing power management related bits...

Newly merged patches for Mesa 24.2 slightly enhance the default out-of-the-box build experience for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on POWER/PowerPC platforms...

The Intel Xe driver is working on supporting PMT functionality with a new set of patches that may be mainlined for Linux v6.11~6.12...

While not talked about as much as the likes of the Intel Gaudi accelerators with their upstream Habana Labs kernel driver or the AMD Instinct MI300 series with their open-source upstream support too, back in 2022 Qualcomm did post an open-source kernel driver for their Cloud AI accelerator. That was followed by an open-source compiler and user-space stack and in turn the QAIC driver was upstreamed into the accelerator (accel) subsystem last year with Linux 6.4...

Intel on Wednesday released version 1.5 of their Linux NPU driver, their user-space driver component for Linux systems in enabling the neural processing unit found with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors and newer. This goes along with their upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for allowing a full open-source solution for AI workloads with the likes of OpenVINO...

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support...

In addition to Mutter seeing Wayland DRM lease protocol support merged, another long-in-development patch series hit GNOME Shell this morning: accent color support!..

Merged today into GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol to allow for nice virtual reality (VR) headset support for GNOME on Wayland...

It was just a few months back that Intel introduced a Gaudi "2C" variant of Gaudi2 to their open-source Linux driver. This variant might be for some export model or otherwise a hyperscaler/customer-specific revision or something along those lines. Now appearing within new Habana Labs driver patches for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel are patches for a new Gaudi 2D variant...

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 12 series open-source compiler that was introduced as stable in 2022, GCC 12.4 is out today as the newest bug fix release...

Another weeks worth of random DRM-Misc-Next changes have been queued ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 merge window...

Theseus Ship is the X11/Wayland compositor previously known as KWinFT developed by Roman Gilg as a fork of KDE Plasma's KWin. Pulling in patches from KWin in this week's KDE Plasma 6.1 release, Theseus Ship 6.1 is now available...

Zhaoxin Shijidadao CPU support was upstreamed today into the GCC 15 compiler codebase. Zhaoxin as a reminder is the joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government for creating x86/x86_64-compatible processors for the Chinese market...

As written about this morning, AMD announced ROCm 6.1.3 with multi-GPU support, beta support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot compatibility, and TensorFlow framework qualification support. The upstream ROCm code on GitHub as of writing continues pointing only to the prior ROCm 6.1.2 software but there is now a Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver offering up ROCm 6.1.3...

Building off the Xe2 foundation in place for the Lunar Lake integrated graphics, more recently Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have begun pushing out code focused on enabling the Xe2-based Battlemage discrete GPUs as the successor to the DG2/Alchemist hardware. That enablement work remains ongoing and with the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle the important fundamental milestone is being crossed of actually being able to drive a connected display/monitor by a Battlemage GPU...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has issued a proposal for creating a new legacy branch for older/less-maintained Gallium3D drivers...

While it looked like all of the Intel Lunar Lake support was wrapped up with the first of these next-gen Core Ultra laptops set to debut next quarter and the Panther Lake bring-up for Linux has begun, it looks like there may be some stragglers still around Lunar Lake. Sent out today was the patch series enabling DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator) support for these upcoming mobile SoCs...

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors...

AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements...

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions...

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory...

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion...

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins...

Framework Computer Inc announced today that they have been working with DeepComputing on a partner-developed RISC-V motherboard for the Framework Laptop 13...

Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February...

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey...

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olak has shown no signs of hitting the end of the road for optimizing OpenGL support within the Mesa/Gallium3D driver stack. More than one decade since joining AMD and more than a decade and a half of being involved with Mesa since beginning as a student developer, Marek still isn't slowing down with his performance optimizations and new features to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers...

A set of patches for the Linux kernel's Intel P-State driver aim to ensure Intel Xeon servers can hit their highest clock frequencies following changes in the server's performance profile. It turns out some special handling is needed to update the highest frequencies of a CPU after boot to ensure the performance profile is properly reflected...

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41...

A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems...

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too...

With the release of Fedora 41 in October, this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution is hoping to have all the software bits aligned that its AMD SEV-SNP virtualization stack will be all squared away for this latest iteration of Secure Encrypted Virtualization...

Intel today released OpenVINO 2024.2, the newest version of its open-source AI toolkit for optimizing and deploying deep learning (A) inference models across a range of AI frameworks and broad hardware types...

As a planned change for Fedora 41, Red Hat engineers are working on upstream GNOME Software better supporting the NVIDIA proprietary driver installation by allowing the installation to work gracefully with UEFI Secure Boot enabled systems...

After last week looking at how FreeBSD 14.1 has improved performance over FreeBSD 14.0, here is an expanded cross-OS comparison now looking at how the new FreeBSD 14.1 stable release compares to the recently released NetBSD 10.0, the current DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release, and then CentOS Stream 9 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for some Linux comparison data points.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making sizable investments into various Linux desktop projects, the Rust-based Coreutils implementation, libmicrohttpd, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and other prominent open-source software that could benefit from greater financial resources. Today they have announced they have opened up for a new round of applications for those open-source projects seeking funding from this German government initiative...

Intel's Open Image Denoise open-source software that is a denoising library used by Blender and other applications is out with a new feature release as it prepares for the integrated graphics of upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors as well as nearing the launch of Xe2 / Battlemage discrete graphics...

Within the every increasingly complex world of CPU security mitigations, Intel engineers have submitted Linux kernel patches to begin taking into account the CPU core "hybrid" topology when determining relevant CPU security vulnerabilities and in turn the mitigations to apply...

Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn's Fedora 41 release...

NumPy 2.0 was released on Sunday that's been in the making for the past year and their first major release since 2006. While it comes with API/ABI breakage, NumPy 2.0 delivers new features and performance improvements...