Those making use of Ubuntu's Chromium Snap for running the Google open-source web browser have been without VA-API support for GPU-based video acceleration within this sandboxed app. Fortunately, it looks like that will soon be crossed off the list for ensuring Ubuntu users can enjoy VA-API acceleration for lowering CPU resources and better power efficiency on Intel graphics and other Mesa Gallium3D drivers supporting VA-API...
It should be hardly surprising at all for longtime Linux users aware of how Fedora Linux tends to always ship with the most modern open-source compiler toolchain support possible, but for Fedora 37 this autumn they again are planning for the latest and greatest...
Being worked on the past several years by Google engineers and others has been the KernelMemorySanitizer (KMSAN) that has already found more than 300 kernel bugs even prior to being mainlined. Sent out prior to the US holiday weekend as the fourth iteration of these patches, building off the "request for comments" sent out in 2020...
A week ago with Linux 5.19-rc4 there was concern over that weekly release being larger than normal, but this week with Linux 5.19-rc5 it's smaller than normal, which is pleasing Linux creator Linus Torvalds...
While GTK4 is still in its early stages and it will presumably be some years before "GTK5" even begins to take shape, GNOME developers are already thinking of ditching X11 support for that next major GTK release -- effectively making it Wayland-only on Linux...
In addition to Intel this week releasing the VA-API 2.15 video acceleration library, their open-source engineers also published their newest quarterly feature release of their open-source Intel Media Driver that implements the VA-API interface for their graphics hardware...
Back in 2018 Intel announced Sound Open Firmware (SOF) as their push for open-source sound firmware and looking to drive new software innovations in the audio DSP space. Out this week is Sound Open Firmware 2.2 for providing the newest features for this open-source software stack supporting Windows and Linux...
For those interested in the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics IP its newest feature is supporting GLSL asynchronous shader compilation...
For those enjoying some Linux gaming over the US holiday weekend, NVIDIA issued a rare Saturday driver update in the form of new Vulkan driver betas for Windows and Linux...
After many months and a lot of work by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers, Linux 5.20 looks like it will be the base kernel where the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics desktop GPUs and Arctic Sound M (ATS-M) server graphics card support will be ready in usable shape...
Linux Mint 21 is working its way toward release this summer as the latest version of this desktop OS that is being built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Unlike Ubuntu 22.04 upstream that is now using systemd-oomd by default on the desktop to try to improve the low memory / system memory pressure experience, Linux Mint has now decided to avoid this daemon due to user criticism...
It's sadly been years since having anything major to report on for Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter game that started out many years ago as Nexuiz. Thankfully a new version of Xonotic was published this week and while it's just a point release, it does come with many improvements...
Firewalld 1.2 was released on Friday as the newest feature release for this Linux firewall daemon. Bug fix releases for existing stable series were released with Firewalld 1.1.2, 1.0.5, and 0.9.9...
The summer months aren't slowing down KDE developers as it's been another busy week of bug fixes and feature work for KDE developers to kick off July...
With the new month comes the latest figures from Valve regarding the Steam on Linux marketshare and other metrics for the past month as a result of the Steam Survey...
The size of the linux-firmware.git tree continues to grow with Linux continuing to support more and more modern hardware that is increasingly reliant upon firmware blobs for operation. Most Linux distributions like Fedora end up installing this entire set of Linux firmware files that can easily be 200~300MB even though most systems only use a few select files. With Fedora 37 later this year they are hoping to better deal with the situation by splitting up of linux-firmware and only installing sets of firmware packages depending upon the actual hardware in use...
RISC-V International has relayed word to us that in China the DeepComputing and Xcalibyte organizations have announced pre-orders on the first RISC-V laptop intended for developers. The "ROMA" development platform features a quad-core RISC-V processor, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and should work with most RISC-V Linux distributions...
With my review last month of the HP Dev One laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and running Pop!_OS I benchmarked it against various laptops I had locally with both AMD and Intel CPUs, including the likes of the very common Tiger Lake SoCs. At the time I hadn't any newer Alder Lake P laptops but now with a Core i7 1280P laptop in hand, here is a look at how that AMD Cezanne Linux laptop can compete with Intel's brand new Alder Lake P SoCs with the flagship Core i7 1280P.
While XWayland is normally used just for running root-less single applications like games within an otherwise native Wayland desktop, new patches from Red Hat that have been merged into the X.Org Server enhance XWayland's existing "root-full" mode of operation for allowing entire desktop environments and window managers to nicely function within the context of XWayland...
As part of the work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver, Valve engineers developed the "ACO" compiler back-end that is now used by default for RADV and has shown to deliver better performance at least for RADV than using AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. There has long been talk about adding ACO support to RadeonSI while in recent weeks there has been new code activity on that front...
During the past month there was a lot of exciting Linux kernel activity, the launch of the HP Dev One, never-ending open-source graphics driver advancements, and much more -- in addition to marking Phoronix turning 18 years old. Here is a look back at the June highlights...
Intel on Friday released libva 2.15 as the newest update to the open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) library used on modern systems for GPU-accelerated video decoding...
Valve has published a SteamOS 3.3 Beta today for those Steam Deck owners or those otherwise loading this Arch Linux based OS image onto their own hardware...
It's been over a half-year since the last Wayland update with the core code now largely mature, but out today is Wayland 1.21 with the new wl_pointer high-resolution scroll event as well as some smaller additions and fixes...
This month Ubuntu developers have been trying to figure out how to best deal with systemd-oomd on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS killing applications like Firefox during high memory/swap use and that leading to a poor user experience when desktop users not being aware of the situation and suddenly finding their software killed...
Over the many years of covering Coreboot (going back to when it was called LinuxBIOS!) on Phoronix the selection of supported motherboards has been rather unfortunate especially over the last decade. If wanting to run Coreboot on a system today it basically means running a Google Chromebook, using an outdated server motherboard or old Lenovo ThinkPad that has seen a Coreboot port, or out of reach to most individuals are various server motherboards that are reference platforms or board designs from hyperscalers. But over the past several months the folks at the 3mdeb consulting firm have carried out a terrific feat: porting their "Dasharo" downstream of Coreboot to a modern and readily available Intel desktop motherboard. I've been trying this out and it has worked out surprisingly well. Here are my experiences and benchmarks of Coreboot/Dasharo on this Intel Alder Lake motherboard.
Intel has sent in their latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes to DRM-Next of their i915 kernel graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.20. In addition to a lot of code churn still around DG2/Alchemist, the open-source Intel driver for Linux 5.20 is also making more preparations for Ponte Vecchio enablement...
Earlier this month Intel began committing Meteor Lake code to Coreboot for beginning to enable what will be the 14th Gen Core processors under this open-source system firmware solution used by Google Chromebooks and other use-cases. Intel engineers are ending out June with more Meteor Lake enablement code landing ahead of these processors expected to launch in 2023...
To this point Fedora out-of-the-box has been restricted to a filtered subset of Flathub packages when enabled via GNOME Software or GNOME Initial Setup. However, legal has now cleared Fedora for allowing unfiltered/unrestricted access to Flathub, allowing a far greater selection of Flatpaks to become available on Fedora Linux with the plan for this to begin with Fedora 37...
Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is out today as the newest Ubuntu mobile operating system update for smartphones from the folks at UBports that continues maintaining the code-base left by Canonical and now pushing ahead in their own direction...
Stemming from last weeks Linux kernel patches suggesting an -O3 experimental option for all CPU architectures and Linus Torvalds rather quickly shooting it down, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance when the kernel image is rebuilt with the -O3 optimization level rather than -O2.
For consumer Radeon GPUs the "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver version has been on the 22.10 series since the end of March. For AMD Radeon PRO professional/workstation graphics the advertised "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise on Linux" driver is still the 21.Q4 driver from last December. AMD appears to be finally prepping to release the "22.20" packaged driver as the next feature release to this packaged AMD Linux driver stack for those not relying just on the upstream kernel and Mesa...
The Microsoft Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa that allows for the Vulkan API to be implemented atop Direct3D 12 for benefit on Windows now has a working pipeline cache implementation...
LLVM release manager Tom Stellard of Red Hat has laid out the planned LLVM/Clang 15.0 release schedule for this next major version of this open-source compiler stack...
Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux...
After what has felt like years of neglect and little progress in advancing this open-source mail/communications client, Thunderbird 102 is out today with some shiny new features and a lot of UI refinements...
Arm today announced their second-generation Armv9 CPU designs with the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715. Arm also refreshed the Cortex-A510 to allow for more cores and a power reduction...
Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance...
In addition to announcing the GeForce GTX 1630 budget card today (expect our Linux review soon), NVIDIA published 515.57 as their newest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release...
With last week seeing AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 released as an update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver and it noting performance improvements, it was time for some fresh benchmarks of that driver up against Mesa's alternative "RADV" Vulkan driver. Here are some fresh benchmarks with an AMD RDNA2 GPU for seeing how RADV continues competing -- and usually outperforming -- AMD's own official open-source driver.
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