Phoronix

Now that the Linux 6.5 merge window ended this past weekend, here is the usual Phoronix overview that lists all the prominent new features and changes coming for this next version.

Last month AMD Linux kernel driver patches revealed a new feature called FreeSync Panel Replay that is basically an improvement over Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for laptop displays. That code didn't make it for the recently-closed v6.5 merge window but this week AMD engineers did post a second iteration of the patches...

AMD has made available the FidelityFX SDK solution available via GPUOpen as their easy-to-integrate offering for FidelityFX technologies...

While the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended days ago and there still is two months to go until that stable release, already the lead developer of the Bcachefs file-system is working to get the code merged for Linux 6.6...

As a follow-up to the news last week when I pointed out that Intel has begun working on Granite Rapids D compiler support for the GNU Compiler Collection, that code has now been merged for next year's GCC 14 release...

Libva 2.19 has been released as the newest feature update for this centralized library used by the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux and other platforms...

Ahead of the planned LibreOffice 7.6 open-source office suite in one month, LibreOffice 7.6 RC1 is available today for testing...

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their in-house designed and manufactured "Virgo" laptop to be built at their facility in Denver. They are hoping to develop the quietest yet most performant Linux laptop. Today they published the initial open-source design files for their custom motherboard PCB in this laptop...

As a devoted Thunderbird mail client user for the past nearly twenty years since its first release, I'm elated today by the release of Thunderbird 115...

With the ASUS ROG Ally being the first device powered by AMD's new Z1 Extreme SoC with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics, it's been very interesting to see its performance advantages over the Steam Deck. But beyond its potential for use in gaming handhelds, it's quite fascinating to see how powerful the Z1 Extreme actually is when removing power restrictions on this SoC. In this article is a wide range of CPU benchmarks putting the Z1 Extreme up against the new Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC as well as prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U for reference. When adjusting the ACPI Platform Profile configuration, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme proves to be very robust from a low-power SoC delivering good battery performance up through pulling 50+ Watts while outperforming the 7840U.

While GIMP 3.0 stable likely not set to debut in 2023 but rather at least release candidates are expected, Canonical is looking at shipping a GIMP 3.0 snapshot in Ubuntu 23.10 in hopes of GIMP 3.0 stable by the time of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or at least a near final v3.0 state...

This shouldn't be particularly surprising for those closely tracking release cycles and the Linux kernel release cadence, but now it's official: Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship with the Linux 6.5 kernel...

Google engineers have published early code around "Device Memory TCP" (a.k.a. Devmem TCP) as a proposal for transferring data to/from device memory efficiently by avoiding the need to copy the data to a host memory buffer...

GRUB 2.12 had been talked about for a mid-2022 release while one year later we are finally greeted by the first release candidate for this next major open-source bootloader release...

Yesterday Oracle published an interesting announcement and doubled down on their intentions of keeping Oracle Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux following Red Hat's controversial announcement last month. Today is another very interesting response to Red Hat's recent shift, this time from the SUSE Linux folks...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat and the lead developer behind the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has released Fwupd 1.9.3 as the newest feature update to this open-source solution for carrying out system and peripheral firmware updates on Linux...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" supports native hardware ray-tracing with RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards where it's matured quite nicely over the past number of months. With the upcoming Mesa 23.2, RADV RT support is enabled by default for all supported GPUs. RADV also has emulated ray-tracing support for older generations of AMD GPUs and as of today it's finally hit a 100% pass rate...

Earlier this month I provided some initial GeForce RTX 4060 vs. Radeon RX 7600 Linux gaming benchmarks for this new sub-$300 graphics card. For those considering this latest Ada Lovelace graphics card for 3D rendering or compute purposes, here are some benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 on that front by looking at the generational performance of the x060 series graphics cards from the RTX 4060 back to the GTX 1060.

Following the stunning decision last month by IBM that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, AlmaLinux quickly came out working on a path forward and Rocky Linux also shared some ideas how they may continue providing a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. We've been waiting for Oracle to comment on their plans for the RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux distribution and today they finally issued a statement...

The AMD Compressonator open-source tool suite that is under the GPUOpen umbrella has now added AVX-512 support alongside other enhancements in its v4.4 update...

Among the many interesting changes that landed the past two weeks for the Linux 6.5 merge window, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates as a whole standout for bringing numerous desktop motherboards and other devices to now enjoy working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

Besides Bcachefs missing out on Linux 6.5, another patch series that didn't get buttoned up in time for the v6.5 merge window was AMD's work on radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation between WiFi 6/6e/7 hardware and AMD's newest SoCs with RDNA3 graphics...

About a year ago Ubuntu changed its default compression level for its initramfs handling down to Zstd level one to deal with slow initramfs creation times on low-end systems / development boards. But since then that has resulted in larger initramfs sizes and yielding other bugs like more quickly filling up the /boot partition on Ubuntu systems. Thus the developers have gone back to the drawing board and are trying to figure out a path forward for better initramfs handling that works well for low-end single board computers while also maximizing space savings and working out well for all Ubuntu use-cases...

While Google shutdown their Stadia game streaming service, with updated firmware there is Bluetooth (BLE) support for the controller as well as USB wired connectivity for those wishing to continue using this gaming controller. Google engineers have also been working on a new Linux driver for enabling force feedback "rumble" support with this controller...

While Intel's Linux engineers were very timely in enabling much of the Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" support for the upstream Linux kernel well ahead of the processor launch at the beginning of the year, one patch series that has continued on post-launch has been working to get the new C0.x idle states supported...

Linus Torvalds just declared the first release candidate of Linux 6.5 that also marks the end of new feature code being introduced for this cycle...

GIMP 2.99.16 is out this Sunday as the GIMP 3.0 release candidate finally nears...

The Hangover open-source project has been working on supporting Windows apps and games on other CPU architectures like AArch64 running Linux. RISC-V and POWER9 are other CPU architectures of interest for enabling Hangover support. Besides leveraging the Wine software, Hangover to date has relied on the QEMU emulator as part of the implementation while now they have begun integrating FEX support too...

The latest iteration of Intel's cluster scheduling support for x86 hybrid P/E-core CPUs were posted on Friday in seeking to enhance the performance of some workloads under Linux when running on recent Intel Core processors...

Today the Linux 6.5 merge window is expected to be closed and one of the lingering issues has been whether the BCacheFS file-system driver will be merged following its pull request having been finally sent in...

HarfBuzz 8.0 was released on Saturday as the newest feature release for this text shaping library used by many open-source software projects from GUI toolkits to desktop environments and other prominent applications...

Last month The RADV ray-tracing pipelines support was enabled by default but then later disabled for VanGogh APUs, notably the Steam Deck. Now though with the latest ray-tracing code in Mesa 23.2-devel the RADV driver is no longer blocking the support for VanGogh...

Last week all of the x86 platform driver feature updates were merged for the Linux 6.5 merge window which is wrapping up tomorrow...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has done a remarkable job on Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation written in Rust for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has another achievement under his belt: OpenCL subgroups are now in place for Mesa...

The Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for the Linux kernel has received a fix to an issue that could lead to inadequate CPU frequency scaling behavior when running on a hybrid processor with E cores disable...

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software has submitted the NTFS(3) file-system driver updates for the nearly-closed Linux 6.5 merge window...

KDE developers remain quite busy working on the Plasma 6.0 desktop development as well as making other enhancements and fixes to their open-source desktop stack...

While Solus is still working toward its new approach based on Serpent OS and other significant fundamental changes to the Linux distribution, shipping today is Solus 4.4 as the latest incremental update to this Linux distro popular with enthusiasts...

Wine 8.12 is available today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

The Intel Xeon Max 9480 flagship Sapphire Rapids CPU with HBM2e memory tops out at 56 cores / 112 threads, so how can that compete with the latest AMD EPYC processors hitting 96 cores for Genoa (or 120 cores with the forthcoming Bergamo)? Besides the on-package HBM2e that is unique to the Xeon Max family, the other ace that Xeon Max holds with the rest of the Sapphire Rapids line-up is support for the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). In today's benchmarks of the Intel Xeon Max performance is precisely showing the impact of how HBM2e and AMX in order to compete -- and outperform -- AMD's EPYC 9554 and 9654 processors in AI workloads when effectively leveraging AMX and the onboard HBM2e memory.

Meta has published the Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL) as a new cross-platform library to provide a single low-level interface that works atop native graphics APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to Apple's Metal...

A new system call found in Linux 6.5 is "cachestat" that allows user-space to query page cache statistics for a file in order to make more informed decisions...

In addition to Fedora 39 aiming to use the Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Workstation, shipping the latest and greatest open-source compiler toolchain components, enhance Linux gaming compatibility, eliminate Flathub filtering, and dozens of other improvements, there are also plans for a more mundane change: a colored bash prompt...

Ubuntu's NVIDIA Unified Device Architecture (UDA) driver package intended for GPU compute acceleration has enabled the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel driver support in their packages since the end of last year. Now with the new NVIDIA Enterprise Ready Driver "ERD" Ubuntu package hitting Ubuntu LTS users, they are also supporting the NVIDIA open GPU kernel driver option there...

As was anticipated, UEFI Unaccepted Memory support was successfully merged for Linux 6.5 to support this standard that's important with the likes of Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Page (SEV-SNP) backed virtual machines...

Hopefully by now all of you have moved off PS/2 mice and keyboards, but should you still have some old systems chugging along with PS/2 hardware, there are some improvements to find with the Linux 6.5 kernel currently under development...

AMD's GPUOpen team on Thursday released the newest version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" SDK for Linux and Windows developers...

The Linux 6.5 media subsystem updates were merged this week for the merge window that is wrapping up this weekend...

For those on the three-year-old GCC 10 compiler series, it's really time to move to a newer GNU Compiler Collection release for enjoying the latest language support, new hardware features, various optimizations, enhanced diagnostics, and more. But for those still bound to GCC 10 for whatever reason, GCC 10.5 was released today as one final update in the branch...

For weeks and weeks I've been eager to see how well the new AMD Zen 4 based "Phoenix" laptop SoCs function and perform under Linux. Recently I finally found an interesting AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop to test and today have some initial Linux benchmarks to share from this Acer Swift Edge 16 laptop with Ryzen 7 7840U SoC and a 3.2K 120Hz OLED display, among other interesting specs.