Phoronix

The GNOME 46 release candidate was officially rolled out today as the last chance to test the GNOME 46 desktop software ahead of its stable release later this month...

Linux 6.8 could debut as stable as soon as tomorrow if all goes well... Linus Torvalds last week was unsure whether an extra release candidate would be needed after the quiet 6.8-rc7 release. This week's seen a continued flow of fixes land, so we'll see what Linus decides on Sunday but in any event there are already a number of early 6.9 pull requests...

Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver for open-source NVIDIA support has merged sparse memory support. This is a big milestone as it's needed for running a number of newer games under Linux...

The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary outlining the interesting feature work and bug fixes to land in the KDE space. Being fresh off the recent Plasma 6.0 release, a lot of bug reports are still coming in while developers are already busy tackling new features for Plasma 6.1...

Wine 9.4 is out today as a rather notable bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

While the Linux v6.8 kernel may debut as stable as soon as this weekend, a last-minute pull request of some new AMD graphics IP was submitted today to DRM-Next in aiming to make it for the imminent Linux 6.9 merge window...

Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API...

While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.

Announced one month ago by Cyberus Technology was an open-source KVM back-end for VirtualBox. This work by Cyberus allows for using the KVM hypervisor with VirtualBox as opposed to its custom kernel module maintained by Oracle. That KVM back-end has now been extended to support SR-IOV graphics virtualization...

AMD engineers and those debugging s2idle suspend/resume issues for Ryzen laptops under Linux will soon have more information at disposal for newer SoCs supporting MP2 STB functionality...

The optional case-insensitive file/folder handling under Linux that's hooked up for various file-systems like EXT4 and F2FS will benefit from improved performance on the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Sent in today as part of the input subsystem fixes for the current Linux 6.8 kernel cycle are adding support for several more HP HyperX gaming controllers...

Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal...

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs...

While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs...

GNUnet 0.21 has been released as a major update to this GNU project building a network stack for secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving distributed applications. GNUnet continues striving for a "GNU internet" and with the v0.21 release has rolled out a new transport layer and working to address prior design shortcomings...

The upcoming GTK 4.14 toolkit release with the new renderers should yield crisper font rendering...

The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing...

The Etnaviv DRM kernel driver providing reverse-engineered support for Vivante graphics and NPU IP has sent out their latest feature changes to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window...

Steven Rostedt this week posted some interesting albeit experimental patches for the Linux kernel to support persistent traces that work across a reboot or crash...

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default...

The merge request enabling basic OpenGL support for the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git this evening as another important step forward for native Wayland support for enjoying Windows games/apps on Linux...

Following the news from earlier around George Hotz' Tiny Corp raising new AMD GPU issues and calling for the MES firmware to be open-sourced followed by a positive message from AMD CEO Lisa Su, there's a new update on the matter following a meeting today between Tiny Corp and AMD...

Intel today released their open-source OpenVINO 2024.0 toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference across a range of hardware...

With the recent NVIDIA 550.54.14 Linux driver release the R550 series is now out as stable. One of the prominent changes with the NVIDIA R550 Linux driver is bringing the GeForce and workstation GPU support up to "CERTIFIED" quality when using NVIDIA's open kernel modules that are distributed as part of their driver package. Previously the open-source (out-of-tree) kernel modules were just certified for their data center GPUs while now they are basically acknowledging that they are in good shape too for GeForce and workstation products. In this article are some benchmarks of the open and proprietary kernel driver options of the NVIDIA R550 Linux driver.

Queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle is an FRU Memory Poison Manager "FMPM" developed by AMD that may later be adapted for other non-AMD platforms. The FRU Memory Poison Manager is working to persist information around known bad/faulty memory across reboots...

George Hotz with Tiny Corp that is working on Tinygrad and TinyBox for interesting developments in the open-source AI space has previously called out AMD over ROCm issues. Yesterday yielded new tweets by "the tiny corp" over AI training runs crashing with MES errors and then called for AMD open-sourcing the firmware to which AMD CEO Lisa Su has responded...

Out today is the big LLVM/Clang 18.1 release. Due to shifting to a new versioning scheme like GCC, today's LLVM 18.1 release is the first major stable release in the new series for what previously would have been called LLVM 18.0...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team recently wrapped up experimental support for the RADV Vulkan driver for EXT_shader_object support using Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) on RDNA3/GFX11 graphics processors...

UWSM is short for the Universal Wayland Session Manager and it incorporates systemd's help in managing the Wayland compositors...

It's been just six days since the release of KDE MegaRelease 6 with Plasma 6.0 and while it's popular with users and smoother than prior major KDE releases, out today is Plasma 6.0.1 for the first round of bug-fixes...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes had been known as CBL-Mariner for "Common Base Linux" while now it appears to be in the process of transitioning to Azure Linux...

As part of Red Hat evaluating x86-64-v3 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, there is the CentOS ISA SIG that's been experimenting with ISA Optimized builds for the x86-64-v3 target. Via the CentOS ISA SIG there is the easy ability to transition an existing CentOS Stream 9 system/server over to using the x86_64-v3 optimized packages. In this article are some benchmarks on a modern Intel Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" server showing the performance benefits when the entire Linux server OS is recompiled for x86_64-v3.

While not as fast-moving as Valve's VKD3D-Proton downstream used by Proton / Steam Play, Wine's VKD3D is out today with a new feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API...

AMD's FreeSync adaptive synchronization technology for displays has come a long way since its 2015 debut and enjoying robust industry adoption. Given the increasing refresh rates of today's TVs and monitors, AMD has rolled out new tier requirements for FreeSync, FreeSync Premium, and FreeSync Premium Pro moving forward...

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11...

The Linux DeviceMapper code is preparing to introduce DM-VDO as the Virtual Data Optimizer that can provide inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, thin provisioning, and other features. DM-VDO has long existed out-of-tree and should be a very useful addition to mainline...

For those interested in FPGAs, AMD today unveiled the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA product family with hardware coming in 2025...

FEX as the open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems continues making good progress not for only enjoying Linux x86 binaries on ARM but also Windows games by way of Steam Play / Wine...

While still an experimental option, the rolling-release systemd Tumbleweed Linux distribution is finding great results in using systemd-boot rather than the GRUB bootloader...

For those still on the FreeBSD 13 series with not having migrated yet to FreeBSD 14, FreeBSD 13.3 was released overnight as the newest incremental update to this mature BSD platform...

GStreamer 1.24 is out today as a major enhancement to this open-source multimedia framework...

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand...

Xiph.Org's Opus open-source audio format for lossy audio coding has rolled out Opus 1.5 as a big update that is now making greater use of machine learning...

Open-source developer Roman Gilg who is known for his work on KWinFT prior to its rebranding as Theseus' Ship has some more important news to share today by way of Phoronix. Here's his guest post announcing The Compositor Modules.

While there is a lot of frustration from the news last week of the HDMI Forum rejecting AMD's open-source HDMI 2.1 driver support plans, the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver won't hopefully have too challenging of an experience in enabling HDMI 2.1 functionality since much of the display handling there is left up to NVIDIA's (closed-source) firmware binaries...

When it comes to the AMD "RDNA3 Refresh" GFX11.5 open-source driver support, to date it's mostly been focused on the GFX 11.5.0 (GFX1150) IP while now being enabled within Mesa 24.1 for the open-source RadeonSI/RADV drivers is support for a GFX 11.5.1 (GFX1151) variant...

The VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension was made public in November 2022 with Vulkan 1.3.235 while finally this past week Intel's open-source Mesa "ANV" driver has merged support for this extension. This Vulkan extension is important for Linux gaming and other scenarios to lower CPU overhead...