Phoronix

The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks...

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support...

GNOME developers remain quite busy with various new initiatives thanks to their funding from their Sovereign Tech Fund. There's some screencasting enhancements still on deck for GNOME 46, various GNOME accessibility improvements forthcoming, and also ongoing work around systemd-homed home directory encryption support...

Sent in this morning via the "x86/urgent" pull request ahead of the Linux 6.8-rc6 kernel later today is a set of patches from Intel to ensure clearing of CPU buffers using the VERW instruction happens at the latest possible point in the return-to-userspace code path. This is being done to better protect against CPU bugs like Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9...

Microsoft's in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution has routinely seen weekly-ish updates to this open-source code used within Azure, WSL, and other areas of the Redmond company. But it's been one month since the prior CBL-Mariner 2.0 release... That changed Saturday night with a shiny new release...

GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input...

CachyOS 240224 was released today for this Arch Linux derived desktop distribution that focuses on being a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" with a variety of desktop options, employing LTO and other optimizations for packages, optional x86-64-v3 binaries, and other tuning to make for a speedy out-of-the-box Linux experience...

Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library...

Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system...

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as its new oneAPI app for ray-tracing and photorealistic rendering built atop its OSPRay ray-tracing engine. Since then we've continued to watch OSPRay Studio pickup new features, add GPU rendering support, and more. On Friday night the OSPRay Studio 1.0 release was finally christened...

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1...

In time for weekend Linux gamers, Valve and their CodeWeavers partners today rolled out their first public beta of Proton 9.0 as their Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with ease under the Steam client...

Wine 9.3 is out this Friday as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux...

A request for comments patch series was posted today for FAMFS, a new special purpose file-system proposal out of Micron for dealing with Fabric-Attached Memory (FAM) devices such as will become more common within the Compute Express Link (CXL) server space...

While the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window has been over for several weeks now, due to a busy February of new hardware releases and lots of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking, I've been behind in writing up my Linux 6.8 feature recap. For those wanting a concise look at the many great changes coming with Linux 6.8 that will debut as stable in March, here's an overview of the interesting Linux 6.8 changes.

Intel's latest release of their Intel Extension for PyTorch "IPEX" now officially supports their consumer Arc A-Series Graphics hardware across Linux, Windows, and also WSL2...

NVIDIA today released their 550.54.14 driver, which is their first production-ready/stable driver version in the R550 series...

Sent in overnight was this week's batch of DRM "fixes" for Linux 6.8 that included some mostly minor fixes plus a few notable but small patches to Nouveau, the upstream open-source NVIDIA DRM/KMS kernel driver...

The Simple DirectMedia Library that is commonly used as an abstraction layer by cross-platform games and other software is now introducing a Vulkan renderer with SDL3...

As a follow-up to the news of Mesa looking at enabling Zink by default as part of the drivers to build out-of-the-box, that change has now been merged. Additionally, the D3D12 Mesa driver that sees regular contributions by Microsoft engineers is also now being compiled by default when running on Windows...

NetworkManager 1.46 was released on Thursday as the newest stable update to this software commonly used for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections from the Linux desktop as well as from command-line environments via the nmcli utility...

It's been almost exactly one month since the release of AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 and today that's been succeded by AMDVLK 2024.Q1.2 that brings a number of new Vulkan extensions plus some performance tuning...

OpenZFS 2.2.3 is out today as the first update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation since OpenZFS 2.2.2 from early December when it was released for dealing with a data corruption issue...

Matthew Wilcox with Oracle who previously worked on the Maple Tree data structure for the Linux kernel along with memory folios has now proposed "Rosebush" as a new hash table data structure for the Linux kernel...

As part of the recent AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and 8600G Linux reviews I ended up picking up the Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 Raptor Lake Refresh processors for the similarly-priced Intel competition. It's not too often receiving review samples from Intel of the lower-end processor SKUs, so I'm back around today with even more benchmarks of these lower-tier AMD and Intel processors. In this article are 500+ benchmarks looking at the CPU and iGPU performance of the Intel Core i3 14100 and Core i5 14500 processors up against the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors under Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical has released the Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS images today as the latest point release for this ongoing Long-Term Support series ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS debut in April...

Building atop Wine 9.0 stable that released last month, CodeWeavers today released their commercial CrossOver 24 software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS systems...

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation...

Ardour 8.4 was released this week as the newest update to this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux / macOS / Windows platforms...

Back in August 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced plans to open-source MoonRay as their production-grade renderer used on films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other animated films. Nearly one year ago in March 2023 MoonRay was open-sourced as OpenMoonRay while this week brings the latest iteration of it: OpenMoonRay 1.5...

The KDE Plasma 6 open-source desktop environment is launching next week and ahead of that the Slimbook V has been announced, the latest laptop crafted in partnership between the KDE project and Slimbook. This KDE-catered Linux laptop will feature the Plasma 6.0 desktop experience out-of-the-box and is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 processor...

For those in Turkey with Casper laptops or otherwise having access to that Turkish PC brand, their Excalibur line of higher-end laptops could soon see better Linux support thanks to a new WMI driver proposal...

GIMP 2.99.18 was released today as the last planned development version prior in the long road to GIMP 3.0 that has been a decade in the making for this free software Adobe Photoshop alternative...

The first "Power11" patches were queued today into the PowerPC's "next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Intel has released a new version of QATlib, their user-space support library for the QuickAssist Technology (QAT) via add-in hardware and recent Xeon Scalable processors...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for modern OpenGL support works on hardware going back to old Broadwell processors with "Gen8" integrated graphics as does the HasVK Vulkan driver for Haswell/Broadwell. But in allowing to focus on the common Skylake "Gen9" graphics and newer/future Intel graphics architectures, pending Mesa code is working to split-off that old Broadwell/Gen8 code. The Gen8 support will continue to be in-tree but separated from the rest of the compiler code so that the code can continue to be improved for newer Intel hardware without risking regressions/breaking those still on Broadwell era processors...

WebKitGTK as the port of the WebKit rendering engine used by GNOME Web (Epipahny) and other software for displaying web content is transitioning to using Skia for its 2D rendering...

Fraunhofer on Tuesday released their latest feature update to the Versatile Video Encoder for open-source H.266/VVC encoding...

Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs...

When it comes to today's complex RGB lighting for PC peripherals and the like it's mostly been left up to user-space. With most RGB devices interfacing via USB, it's been up to Linux user-space projects like OpenRGB, OpenRazer, etc, to implement their RGB lighting controls as needed. But as RGB lighting use continues to grow in the PC space for better or worse, there's an increasing need for a kernel API to handle complex RGB devices. Such an API is currently being devised...

As many enthusiasts wait to hear from AMD more broadly supporting ROCm in an official capacity across consumer Radeon GPUs and/or hearing about better supporting more Linux distributions outside of the major enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD announced a new medium for their communications with the community: the "New AMD ROCm Software Blog Platform" will be rolling out...

At the end of last year Intel hosted a survey of open-source developers to collect their feeback on various open-source software issues. Intel's 2023 Open Source Community Survey is all wrapped up, the data tallied up, and the results emailed out today to participants...

The Bcachefs file-system that was mainlined to the Linux kernel last year has received a grant from the NLNet Foundation...

Earlier this month I posted some initial CPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper up against AMD EPYC Zen 4 and Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids processors. That was a very interesting battle and showed the interesting capabilities of the 72 Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. With this GPTshop.ai GH200 system actually being in workstation form, I also ran some additional benchmarks looking at the CPU capabilities of the GH200 compared to AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series workstations.

Red Hat announced today some changes to how they handle their beta releases for minor updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

There are some new Linux kernel patches that were posted by Intel on Monday that aim to help enhance the overall performance and power efficiency of new Meteor Lake laptop processors under Linux...

There are still no signs of a new X.Org Server feature release coming in the near-term with most of the major stakeholders divesting from the xorg-server besides the XWayland portion of the code-base. But for those interested in the past few days there have been some NetBSD/OpenBSD build fixes to the X.Org Server as well as clearing out some remnants of old compiler support...

With Valve's release today of the Steam Audio SDK 4.5.2 they have made the software development kit fully open-source under an Apache 2.0 license...