Phoronix

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates for Linux 6.8 have been submitted for dealing with ECC reporting under Linux and the other error detection/recovery driver updates...

There's been much work recently on a new unified renderer for the GTK toolkit. Yesterday a merge request was opened and already merged that enables Vulkan by default...

While much of the focus by graphics vendors these days is on their Vulkan driver support/performance and less so about OpenGL in 2024, AMD's open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Linux systems is still showing no signs of slowing down and still scoring more performance victories...

Rust For Linux maintainer Miguel Ojeda was among those submitting early pull requests of code feature changes for the now-open Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Following Linus Torvalds' release of the Linux 6.7 kernel last night, the FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-libre 6.7-gnu as their downstream that strips out non-free microcode/firmware blob support and removes other bits that are not deemed in the interest of free software...

As anticipated Linus Torvalds went ahead and just released the Linux 6.7 kernel as the first new version of 2024...

In recent days there have been leaks about an MSI "CLAW" gaming handheld device set to be announced this coming week at CES in Las Vegas. Making this gaming handheld device interesting is that unlike the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally or Legion Go, it's expected to be the first handheld featuring an Intel Meteor Lake SoC. In particular, the recently launched Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. For those curious about what the performance is likely to roughly be in comparison to the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these competing SoCs.

Linux 6.7 should be released later today as the first stable kernel of 2024. In turn the Linux 6.8 merge window will then open tomorrow and run for the next two weeks. For those curious about the features expected for Linux 6.8, here's an early look at some of the changes expected to land for that next kernel cycle...

Debuting in late 2022 was memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used open-source RAM tester. Coming out today is memtest86+ 7.0 as the latest major update to this leading PC memory testing solution...

OpenBLAS 0.3.26 was released this week as the newest feature update to this open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

The Linux 6.7 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today following the one week delay due to the end-of-year holidays. Here's a reminder about some of the best features in Linux 6.7...

Landing in Mesa 24.0-devel this week alongside other exciting changes is some pending work for enhancing VKD3D-Proton and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) support for the RADV Vulkan driver...

In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the "46.alpha" builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published...

After the merge request was open since August of 2022, merged today is support within the GNOME Remote Desktop code for handling graphical remote log-ins...

A few months back AMD announced the MicroBlaze V processor as a soft-core RISC-V processor for embedded system use. With Linux 6.8 the necessary DeviceTree support is landing for the AMD MicroBlaze V...

OpenJPH as the open-source library implementing JPEG2000 Part-15 (JPH / HTJ2K) support is out with a big feature release...

One of the limitations of Google Chrome's Wayland support has been the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) not being supported for GPU-based video acceleration as it's directly targeted the libva-x11 library. But with code merged on Friday to Chromium, libva-drm is now used to allow for working VA-API acceleration on X11 or Wayland...

For the GNOME desktop among the technologies that will hopefully mature into good shape this year are high dynamic range (HDR) display support as well as variable refresh rate (VRR). When it comes to the VRR support there's been more Mutter progress made in this effort...

After no release candidate of Wine 9.0 was published last week due to the end-of-year holidays, Wine 9.0-rc4 is out as the newest test candidate for this forthcoming stable version to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux...

In the land of odd hardware bugs and interesting Linux kernel behavior, a fix was merged today for Linux 6.7 and to be back-ported to existing stable kernel series for dealing with a situation where unexpected system reboots could happen primarily on AMD Ryzen systems when using Firewire (IEEE-1394)...

A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games...

It looks like 2024 could bring improved support for the Snap app sandboxing/packaging format across Linux distributions to better the overall experience of this Flatpak alternative outside the confines of Ubuntu...

With Intel's 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors that were released last month, in addition to the power efficiency improvements, faster DDR5 memory support, and other enhancements, one of the other notable enhancements talked up by Intel was improved AVX-512 support. Here are some benchmarks using the flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ looking at the performance and thermal/clock/power metrics when toggling AVX-512 support.

As part of the VFS changes submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window, a new "BLK_DEV_WRITE_MOUNTED" Kconfig option is added that allows controlling whether writes are allowed to mounted block devices...

Ahead of the Linux 6.7 stable kernel release expected on Sunday, some early pull requests have already begun trickling in for the Linux 6.8 merge window to follow. The SLAB updates were sent to Linus Torvalds on Friday in preparing for this next kernel cycle...

The upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle will introduce support for Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) for use within KVM virtualized guests...

The Intel frame-buffer driver "IntelFB" has been solicited for removal from the mainline Linux kernel. This FBDEV driver is for supporting very old Intel i8xx/i9xx integrated graphics hardware...

Ahead of the Linux 6.7 kernel set to be released on Sunday, Red Hat's David Airlie has sent in some last minute fixes for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" DRM kernel driver. These fixes are for addressing fallout from the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware support merged for the v6.7 cycle...

AMD's open-source Linux software engineers continue preparing the Linux kernel for supporting next-generation Zen 5 processors...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on two separate change proposals for further enhancing the system security with the in-development Fedora 40 Linux to be released in April...

With some last minute fixes sent out today, the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel's AMDGPU driver will be in good shape for some upcoming AMD Radeon graphics hardware...

Last week I posted a number of fresh GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler performance benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX (Zen 4) system using the HP Z6 G5 A workstation running Ubuntu Linux. For those wondering about the performance of GCC vs. Clang generated binaries on something much more modest, here are some benchmarks when testing on a Meteor Lake laptop with the Core Ultra 7 155H.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas, AMD announced today the Versal AI Edge XA Adaptive SoC and the Ryzen Embedded V2000A Series processor. The Ryzen Embedded V2000A is an x86 automotive-qualified processor family for next-generation automotive digital cockpits. Given the automotive/embedded focus, Linux plays a big role with the forthcoming hardware and its adoption by multiple automotive companies...

ARM11 MPCore support for the early ARMv6 multi-processor (SMP) support is set to be retired with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Ubuntu's install media (ISO) generation recently broke the assembly of source ISOs. These are the ISOs containing all of the source code packages to Ubuntu Linux with the original motivation of helping GPL license compliance and ensuring the code is easily accessible. But the usefulness in practice is limited and now instead Ubuntu developers are considering the discontinuing of source ISOs...

It's been over twenty years since the ATI Radeon R300 series was introduced but thanks to the open-source Mesa Gallium3D OpenGL driver, there continues to be new improvements made to this driver for these aging Radeon graphics cards on Linux. A few hundred lines of code were merged today for further enhancing the ATI R300 Gallium3D driver in 2024...

For those making use of the Newlib C standard library for embedded systems, Red Hat kicked off the new year by releasing Newlib 4.4...

AMD engineers are proposing an FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface to overcome current limitations of the Linux kernel's FPGA manager subsystem...

A release plan has been drafted for the upcoming GNU C Library "glibc" 2.39 release as well as some possible last minute changes...

The AMD Address Translation Library (ATL) is cleaning up and centralizing existing code within the Linux kernel for Zen-based systems. After being reviewed on the kernel mailing list, the AMD ATL is set to be introduced as part of the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Given the pace of hardware support and improvements these days, it's rather sad Linux Mint 21.3 continues to default to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel that is the non-HWE default of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for which the operating system is based. But at least Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are being rolled out to make Linux 6.2 easily available for those with newer hardware support requirements...

While years ago it was hard envisioning Microsoft contributing significantly to the Linux kernel or Mesa 3D graphics driver stack, maintaining its own in-house Linux distribution, or publishing so much open-source software, these days it's par for the course thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Linux dominating Azure instances, etc. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft continued investing in various Linux/open-source efforts that benefit their cause...

When it comes to new BSD milestones to look forward to in 2024, one of the big releases on deck is that of NetBSD 10.0 that has been in development since 2019. Now available for testing is the second release candidate of NetBSD 10...

Not only is Canonical exploring Ubuntu x86-64-v3 builds for targeting Intel and AMD processors with AVX/AVX2 support, but Red Hat has publicly confirmed now they are exploring a possible x86-64-v3 requirement for next year's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10...

Intel along with investment firm DigitalBridge Group announced the formation today of Articul8, an independent company to focus on turn-key Generative AI "GenAI" for enterprise customers and focused on enterprise workflows...

Last month LVFS/Fwupd celebrated serving more than 100 million firmware updates to Linux users while today Fwupd 1.9.11 has shipped as the latest update to this open-source firmware updating solution...

While Wine (and downstreams like Valve's Proton) allow many newer Windows games and applications to run very well on modern Linux systems even when it comes to recent Direct3D 12 games and the like, sometimes it's the older games/apps that can be more of a headache to workaround bugs in the software and other aging relics. One of the latest issues leading to an upstream Linux kernel discussion is over the game Nuclear Strike first published in 1997 for Microsoft Windows 98 in trying to get it running with Wine on Linux...

With Linux 6.6, the mainline kernel finally landed support for Shadow Stack on Intel/AMD CPUs that was originally rolled out as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for better fending off ROP attacks. The GNU C Library "glibc" was recently updated with some changes around the CET / Shadow Stack support...

Overnight Intel released their newest quarterly updates to their Intel Media Driver providing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support on Linux systems as well as their updated oneVPL video processing library that is part of their oneAPI software stack and leveraging the Intel Media Driver...

An important Linux kernel patch series has been updated for the new year that in synthetic tests has yielded a ~12x throughput improvement on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system...