Phoronix

In addition to Intel preparing to merge their new Xe kernel graphics driver into the mainline kernel potentially for Linux 6.8, their existing open-source Intel kernel graphics driver code continues to be improved upon and receiving new features...

With the recent 1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers remain quite busy working on improving the accessibility and security of the GNOME desktop...

It's a Christmas season of bug fixing in the KDE world as following the late November Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 they've shifted from feature work to fixes and with the new test release has received an influx of bug reports...

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M...

The release process has begun for releasing Wine 9.0 as stable early next year...

Vulkan 1.3.273 was released today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API...

Intel engineers maintain multiple Ethernet drivers in the Linux kernel for their wide-range of networking hardware from consumer to high-end data center wares. There's been an ongoing effort to overhaul their Ethernet driver management to reduce code duplication between the different drivers for better code sharing and with an end goal of more unification...

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) are intended to help provide better security for virtual machines and are key elements to both companies investments around confidential computing. It turns out they have a common enemy in their VM security goals: x86 32-bit software...

It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics...

Canonical's Multipass software that is advertised as "cloud-style VMs at your fingertips" and making it easy to spin-up "Ubuntu VMs on demand for any workstation", is out with a new test release adding snapshots support and other new features...

PoCL 5.0-RC1 is out today as the newest feature release being brewed for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for OpenCL code to run on CPUs as well as running OpenCL code on other back-ends such as atop NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm and other LLVM back-ends...

Friday's release of Wine 8.22 is expected to be the last bi-weekly feature release before shifting focus to the code freeze and making Wine 9.0 ready for release in early 2024. It's coming down to the finish line how much more Wine Wayland driver functionality will be merged in time...

It looks like Intel will soon be submitting their first Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver pull request to DRM-Next for mainlining this modern, current and future hardware focused kernel graphics driver to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It looks like this mainlining is set to still happen in time for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle...

Following yesterday's big AMD AI event where they launched the Instinct MI300A / MI300X and ROCm 6.0, today AMD engineers released Radeon GPU Profiler 2.0 along with other GPUOpen tooling updates...

A new drm-misc-next pull request was sent today to DRM-Next bringing a few notable changes for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window...

KDE's KWin compositor has added DMA-Fence deadline support to its DRM back-end that can help ensure rendering is completed on-time and otherwise helping to boost the GPU clock speeds...

Alpine Linux 3.19 has been released as the newest feature update to this lightweight Linux distribution employing Busybox and libc...

As an early Christmas present for Linux kernel developers and others keeping track of kernel development, the git.kernel.org Cgit web interface has rolled out native dark mode support...

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October...

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser...

The Red Hat engineers responsible for creating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) are celebrating tonight with LVFS paired with the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility now having served more than 100 million firmware updates!..

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines...

In addition to AMD using its AI event today for launching the Instinct MI300A and MI300X along with ROCm 6.0, AMD also announced the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors. A big emphasis with these forthcoming laptop processors is on the AI capabilities between the dedicated NPU with AMD XDNA, Zen 4 CPU cores with AVX-512 VNNI support, and AMD RDNA3 graphics capable of accelerating AI.

At AMD's AI event today the company provided more details on their Instinct MI300 series for their very exciting data center APU and CDNA3 discrete GPU accelerator. ROCm 6.0 was also announced for advancing AMD's AI software capabilities.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community...

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks...

Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot...

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors...

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new "GFX12" hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed...

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives...

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to "several times faster" than the existing JSON functions...

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There's been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey...

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

Following the SLOB allocator removal earlier this year, the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is now positioned to remove the SLAB allocator. Additionally, the lone good-for-everything SLUB allocator is set to receive further optimizations...

GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility...

Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop...

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI...

TornadoVM 1.0 has been released as the open-source software providing an OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in for allowing Java on heterogeneous hardware from multi-core CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs. TornadoVM allows targeting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V devices for a rather robust array of hardware support...

Published originally back in October were a set of patches for allowing different compression algorithms for the Linux hibernation image to yield faster restore times. That work -- focused on LZ4 compression support -- has been revised as it works toward the mainline kernel...

Intel's CPU temperature driver "coretemp" within the Linux kernel is being adapted so it can report CPU core temperatures in excess of 128 cores...

If the likes of the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally are out of your budget or you just prefer enjoying more classic, less demanding games, there are Linux kernel patches being floated to allow mainline support for a sub-$200 ARM-powered handheld gaming console...

Being worked on recently by Boris Brezillon at Collabora is Panthor, a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali graphics processors...

Flowblade 2.12 is now available as this multi-track, non-linear video editor for Linux systems. Shotcut as another open-source video editor also recently put out a new version too...

One of the latest Linux kernel patch series posted by AMD Linux engineers is for enabling an AMD QoS RMID pinning feature found within their latest generation processors...

As part of AWS Nitro Enclaves, coming for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is a Nitro Secure Module driver...

A number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring whether using the newer Linux 6.6 stable kernel or Linux 6.7 development kernel deliver any additional gains when running on the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series hardware. Here are some benchmarks looking at that while using a Threadripper 7980X workstation...

TuxClocker continues on its quest as being one of the leading open-source GUI control panels for overclockers and enthusiasts on Linux. Out this morning is TuxClocker 1.4 that brings more features for making this Qt-based open-source app more useful for those overclocking or just wanting to keep a better eye on their hardware's performance and thermals/power from the Linux desktop...

The newest monthly release of FEX is now available for this open-source project that allows running x86_64 games and applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux environments...

Red Hat's Richard Hughes just released Fwupd 1.9.10 as the newest version of this open-source utility for facilitating device and system firmware/BIOS updates under Linux in conjunction with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the easy distribution of such firmware updates...

Armbian 23.11 was released this week as the decade-old Linux distribution project focused on providing good Arm single board computer support...