Phoronix

Following last week's AMDGPU pull to DRM-Next preparing more next-gen GPU support and other updates for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window, another batch of feature changes were sent out on Friday ahead of this next kernel cycle...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week...

Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms...

While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn't released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change...

Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories...

The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot's Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users...

Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management...

While systemd 255 last year introduced a "blue screen of death" inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it's not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set to be introduced now with Linux 6.10 is a parallel "blue screen of death" like error presenting experience with the introduction of the DRM panic handler...

As the first new release to Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes...

It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader...

It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he's shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort...

Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection...

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week...

Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel's scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve's Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay...

With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I've been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 installation.

While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds...

On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel's open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality...

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."..

There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities...

With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we're beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just "RHEL clones". It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that's been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels...

System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year...

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging FFmpeg is out with its newest release...

Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications...

LXQt 2.0 is now available for this lightweight desktop environment that has now been ported to the Qt 6.6+ toolkit. Additionally, much of the LXQt components are ready to be used under Wayland compositors...

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved RPM 4.20 to land for the Fedora 41 cycle that will debut in H2'2024. RPM 4.20 is a significant update for this widely-used packaging format...

Queued as part of the ARM64 patches in the various "-next" branches ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is a script for being able to build Flat Image Trees (FITs). A Flat Image Tree is the compiled Linux kernel paired with the associated DeviceTree content that is compressed and easily then distributed and executed by capable bootloaders...

Merged on Tuesday into GNOME Mutter is NVIDIA secondary GPU copy acceleration support that allows for much better performance of hybrid laptops featuring integrated graphics paired with a discrete NVIDIA GPU...

As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May...

The much anticipated ROCm 6.1 has now been released! ROCm 6.1 is heavy on new features as well as expanding official operating system coverage to include the latest Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS point release...

The Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders like Intel, Red Hat, Hugging Face, MariaDB, Cloudera, and others have launched the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) as a new enterprise AI collaborative effort...

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system...

Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they've released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork...

It's been three weeks since the Plasma 6.0.3 point release while today KDE has shipped Plasma 6.0.4 as its April bug-fix release...

Following the launch of the Ryzen 8000G series processors earlier this year as well as the Ryzen 8840 series mobile processors, AMD has now announced the associated "PRO" parts for business customers.

At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org...

In addition to Vulkan explicit sync under X11, another merge request hitting Mesa 24.1 overnight that's worth mentioning is the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver now supporting VK_EXT_image_compression_control...

With the new security mitigation for the "Native BHI" Spectre vulnerability affecting even the recent Intel processors, a number of Phoronix readers have been curious about the performance impact of the mitigation. Over the past week I've been running some benchmarks on recent Intel CPUs to better look into any performance implications...

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices...

The Bcachefs fixes continue to come in on the heavier side for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta is out today for this popular community-oriented Linux distribution derived from upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Besides pulling in the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux 9.4 also restores hardware support for some devices that was deprecated by upstream RHEL...

openSUSE's Leap Micro OS that caters to containerized and virtualized workloads by providing a lightweight and reliable foundation is embarking on its next major release. The openSUSE Leap Micro 6.0 operating system is now available in alpha form...

Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format...

Continuing a trend worked on in recent Fedora Linux releases and more broadly in the open-source ecosystem at large for securing the software supply chain and ensuring unaltered binaries, Fedora 41 is aiming to ensure more reproducible package builds...

Ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement, the Firefox 125.0 release binaries have been uploaded to the Mozilla mirror this morning. Firefox 125.0 brings a number of new features and developer additions -- more so than we've seen recently from the monthly Firefox releases...

The Rust-based Servo web layout engine started by Mozilla that is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation and worked on by several different organizations is eyeing modularity support for its JavaScript integration. Currently Servo is closely tied to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine but with a modularity push could see other options supported...

Xiph.Org has released RNNoise 0.2 as the recurrent neural network for audio noise reduction. This library leverages a neural network model for enhancing real-time noise suppression...

Archinstall 2.8 is out today as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it much faster deploying this popular Linux distribution...

FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines...

For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory "XDG_BASE_DIR" specification...