Phoronix

It's Blender 4.2 release day! Blender 4.2 marks the newest long-term support (LTS) release for this wonderful free software 3D modeling solution that has developed quite a following across the industry...

While many have been excited around the prospects of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, the Linux support so far still leaves a lot to be desired... The initial Snapdragon X Elite laptops aren't utilizing ACPI standards and the bring-up under Linux has been slow, but patches have begun appearing for some models. But even with patches, the Adreno GPU remains a big obstacle still being tackled along with other features like web camera, USB4, Bluetooth, etc. With a new kernel patch, the GPU for the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) is being disabled by default...

There's a new driver subsystem being introduced in the Linux 6.11 kernel for power sequencing...

For the past year and a half Intel engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements for Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) in the presence of Resource Director Technology (RDT). Intel has been advising its customers not to use Sub-NUMA Clustering when making use of Resource Director Technology since these features would effectively fight eachother. Well, with the Linux 6.11 kernel that's finally being addressed...

Stemming from a recent investigation into a GCC compiler regression on Zen 4, it was discovered that the unaligned load/store costs for the Zen 4 and Zen 5 targets were inaccurate and have now been tweaked within GCC Git...

Linus Torvalds began the Linux 6.11 merge window yesterday by merging some of his own feature code for this next kernel version...

The Solus Linux project announced today they will be dropping the AppArmor patches carried by their kernels. In turn this means their Snap packaging support will only run with partial confinement...

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors...

Following last night's release of the Linux 6.10 kernel, the FSF LA developers have released GNU Linux-libre 6.10-gnu as their downstream kernel flavor that strips out the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and the ability to load non-free firmware/microcode into open-source drivers, among other alterations in the name of software freedom...

Last week I had the pleasure to be out in Los Angeles for the AMD Tech Day focused on their new Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" and Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" processors. This was an exciting event with many new details shared around Zen 5 CPU cores and the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics found with the upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors. The embargo concerning those architectural details have now expired while the review/benchmarking embargo isn't until a later date.

Alongside all of the exciting Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 series details shared last week at the AMD Tech Day in Los Angeles, what I also found to be very interesting was AMD sharing a bit more about a "Unified AI Software Stack" they are working to release in the coming quarters...

The Chrome platform changes for Linux 6.11 as code predominantly for enabling Chromebooks with the mainline Linux kernel is set to introduce two new drivers...

Coming in as a rather late change proposal for Fedora 41 is to support self-encrypting drives from within the OS installer...

Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet has already sent out all of the exciting Linux 6.11 feature updates for this copy-on-write file-system. Bcachefs continues maturing nicely within the mainline Linux kernel while continuing to tack on new functionality...

Among the flurry of pull requests submitted now that the Linux 6.11 merge window is open are the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates...

Wine 9.13 was released on Sunday as off its usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment for this newest development build...

As anticipated the Linux 6.10 kernel was released as stable a few minutes ago by Linus Torvalds...

With Linux 6.10 expected to be released in the coming hours, in turn the Linux 6.11 merge window will open tomorrow unless there is any last-minute v6.10 release delay. With that said, here's a look at some of the features you can likely expect to see for this next kernel version...

Arch Linux based CachyOS has released their "July 2024" release that also introduces an AMD Zen 4 optimized repository that caters to current Ryzen 7000/8000 and EPYC 4004/8004/9004 (Zen 4) procssors and upcoming Zen 5 processors...

Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent out his various pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window. One of the more interesting pull requests from Brauner this cycle are the "vfs procfs" updates that now allow restricting access to the /proc/[pid]/mem files of processes...

While Fedora 41 isn't even out yet, early feature planning is already underway for Fedora 42 that will debut in the early months of 2025. One of the interesting proposals raised so far is for making use of the new DRM Panic screen functionality for a "Blue Screen of Death" of sorts for better presenting kernel error messages in case of kernel panics...

Patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for getting various Lenovo devices supported by the mainline Linux kernel that rely on the Qualcomm MSM8916 and MSM8939 platforms...

Linux 6.10 stable should be released later today. It's been a fairly calm week in the kernel world and thus Linus Torvalds will most likely opt for tagging v6.10 as opposed to doing a v6.10-rc8 extra release candidate. So with Linux 6.10 likely upon us, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes in this new kernel release...

The alpha release of GNOME 47 is now available for testing and comes with a number of shiny new features for this big open-source desktop update due out in September...

A patch posted for the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver finally allows for fan speed reporting with Arc Graphics and other Intel discrete graphics cards under Linux...

Last week it was noted AMD would be squeezing in more patches for "new IPs" to "get them tied off" with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. This is principally about RDNA4 support and sure enough on Friday more patches were submitted to DRM-Next...

The I2C host changes are ready for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window...

Pingora started out as an in-house replacement to Cloudflare's Nginx usage that was written in Rust and eventually open-sourced earlier this year. Pingora has evolved into a Rust framework for building fast and reliable networked systems. Ending out the week is the release of Pingora 0.3 as the latest step forward for this Rust code that is widely used within the confines of Cloudflare...

Git 2.46-rc0 was published on Friday as the first tagged development release on the trek toward Git 2.46...

This Week in GNOME is out with their latest issue to highlight all of the interesting work that has taken place over the past seven days in the GNOME camp...

For fans of OBS Studio as a popular cross-platform solution for gaming live-streamers and used for other desktop screen-casting purposes, OBS Studio 30.2 is now available as stable...

System76 continues working vigorously on COSMIC, their Rust-written Linux desktop environment being written for Pop!_OS and to see availability on other Linux distributions as well. They are finishing up last minute changes before putting the flag on a COSMIC alpha release...

It was just announced at the end of last year that Holly Million was named as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. After a little more than a half-year, this previous outsider to GNOME announced she will be stepping down from her post. A new interim executive director will be starting while the search begins for a permanent replacement...

This week AWS announced that Graviton4 went into GA with the new R8G instances after Amazon originally announced their Graviton4 ARM64 server processors last year as built atop Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. I eagerly fired up some benchmarks myself and I was surprised by the generational uplift compared to Graviton3. At the same vCPU counts, the new Graviton4 cores are roughly matching Intel Sapphire Rapids performance while being able to tango with the AMD EPYC "Genoa" and consistently showing terrific generational uplift.

Oliver Smith with Canonical has been communicating a lot in recent months around the great improvements planned for Ubuntu 24.10. Canonical engineers and the Ubuntu community have been working on many significant improvements for the desktop in Ubuntu 24.10. Today is a new blog post by Oliver to highlight some of the recent changes...

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" is now available as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) of this open-source and cross-platform mail client...

Over the past year there have been a lot of GTK4 graphics offload improvements including work on its Vulkan renderer. Another round of graphics offload improvements have been recently wrapped up for this open-source toolkit...

openSUSE's Aeon desktop operating system that brings automated maintenance and other features to be a platform that "just works" is preparing for what they describe as comprehensive full disk encryption...

Libavif 1.1 has arrived as the newest feature release to this library for implementing the AV1 Image File Format with image encode and decode capabilities...

Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted...

There have been ongoing reports from a variety of users and systems around high power use during GPU-accelerated video playback with current-generation AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" laptops. Fortunately, an optimization is coming to benefit Phoenix and forthcoming Strix Point laptops with noticeably lower power consumption during video playback...

One year ago Meta released IGL as the Intermediate Graphics Library as a cross-platform, low-level graphics interface built atop native graphics APIs like OpenGL, Vulkam, and Metal. This MIT-licensed library has seen its first tagged version in the form of IGL 1.0...

The Mold linker is already a high-speed alternative to the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Its performance is very impressive while those using it while carrying out debug builds have the ability to achieve an insane speed-up thanks to a new option...

Colin Percival who took over as the release engineering lead for FreeBSD last November has come up with two important changes for this BSD operating system's release engineering process...

Building off last month's release of XWayland 24.1 that brought explicit sync support, improved rootful, and other changes, the first point release has now been issued...

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language...

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!..

Updated AMD CPU microcode was published today and subsequently merged into linux-firmware.git for all Family 17h and Family 19h processors, spanning Zen 1 through Zen 4 models...

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle is Intel's "Performance Limit Reasons" reporting for indicating why a processor may be downclocking...

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade...