Phoronix

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...

It was two years since the release of Pacman 6.0 as Arch Linux's package manager software while overnight Pacman 6.1 was released with a tag line "it's been a while..." With Pacman 6.1 comes a few new features...

With the absence of any official AMD Radeon graphics control panel / settings GUI for Linux enthusiasts/gamers, there are several open-source projects striving to be a viable Radeon GUI control area for Linux gamers/enthusiasts. LACT 0.5.3 was released this weekend as the newest version of this option for AMD Radeon information reporting, GPU overclocking, fan control, power/thermal monitoring, and additional power state configurations...

For those that have experienced glitches while playing back VP9 video content using AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) for GPU acceleration, updated firmware should fix those VP9 decode problems...

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.8-rc7 as we close in on the Linux 6.8 stable release in the next week or two...

In preparation for the GNOME 46 release candidate, the "46.rc" versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published this morning. The release candidate work is mostly about fixing outstanding issues but there are also some lingering fixes that made it into these releases...

OpenMediaVault 7.0 was released today as a major update to this open-source Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution built around Debian Linux. This plug-based NAS platform with web UI allows supporting a variety of services/protocols is now even more capable with the OpenMediaVault 7.0 availability...

The Rust-written Redox OS is out with a new monthly status report to outline the enhancements made to this open-source operating system during the month of February...

Merged this week ahead of the Wine 9.4 development release due out next Friday is support for using the new Vulkan VK_EXT_map_memory_placed extension to overcome a performance penalty with Windows on Windows 64-bit (WOW64) for games/apps...

GDB 14.2 has been released to provide a few fixes for the GNU Debugger over its state found in last year's GDB 14.1...

Better late than never, merged yesterday into the FFmpeg Git codebase is a DVD-Video demuxer...

Nate Graham is out with his belated weekend update to highlight all of the interesting KDE development activity for the week. This week, of course, saw the release of KDE MegaRelease 6 with Plasma 6.0, KDE Gear 24.02, and KDE Frameworks 6.0 in tow. Post-launch Graham characterizes Plasma 6.0 as being in good shape and the extra QA paying off. He commented, "Hopefully this should help banish those now 16-year-old painful memories of KDE 4. It's a new KDE now. Harder, better, faster, stronger!"..

It's happened! After three years in the making, the GNOME desktop Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" support has been merged after obtaining a feature freeze exception for GNOME 46 due out later in March...

Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox...

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension...

Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired...

The WavPack open-source lossless wavefile compressor is up to version 5.7 after more than one year in development. Making this new release quite notable is adding multi-threaded encode and decode support to the WavPack library and its CLI tools...

Should you be running nine or more GPUs per system, the Mesa 24.1 release next quarter will raise the limit of 8 DRM devices for the Vulkan API per system to now allow a theoretical 256 GPUs per system...

With Steam on Linux use for January clocking in at 1.95%, I was very eager to see if the February results would once again surpass the 2.0% threshold... Unfortunately, it moved in the opposite direction...

Intel has made open-source its NPU Acceleration Library (intel-npu-acceleration-library) as a user-space library for Windows and Linux systems for interfacing with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found initially on their new Meteor Lake laptops...

It looks like the new Panthor DRM driver will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel now that it made it into drm-misc-next today. In turn the Mesa 24.1-devel code has landed support for this newer Arm Mali graphics into the Panfrost Gallium3D driver...

Succeeding last year's Coreboot 4.22 release is now a new release... Coreboot 24.02. This open-source system firmware project is now the latest to shift to a year-month versioning system. The newly-christened Coreboot 24.02 brings support for three new motherboards, a number of ACPI updates, and also pulls in the new GRUB 2.12 and other changes...

The long in-development work for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support plumbed into GNOME's Mutter compositor might still make it for the GNOME 46 desktop release due out this month. It's still being treated as an experimental feature at this point but a feature freeze exception is being sought to allow its inclusion this release rather than waiting for GNOME 47 in the autumn...

Intel has published oneDNN 3.4 as the newest version of this Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI software collection. The oneDNN library provides deep learning primitives for software like PyTorch, MXNet, ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, MATLAB Deep Learning Toolbox, and other sotware...

The X.Org Foundation's elections for the Board of Directors have been delayed as there weren't enough participants nominated for the available seats to hold an election...

There had been some hope that the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop would support the JPEG-XL image format out-of-the-box, but that isn't going to happen as a default change...

A last set of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted this week for DRM-Next to stage ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window...

February was an exciting month in the hardware and Linux/open-source space with 224 original news articles written by your's truly over the past month along with 15 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark featured articles. There was a lot of exciting open-source accomplishments, the launch of the AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs with RDNA3 graphics, breaking the news about ZLUDA providing CUDA atop AMD ROCm as a formerly stealth project, the Znver5 GCC patch emerging, and more...

Musl libc 1.2.5 released on Thursday as the newest version of this lightweight, speedy, and free software C library implementation that is popular for embedded use, containers, and elsewhere...

Now rolling into March, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS "Noble Numbat" has entered its feature freeze period ahead of its official release in April...

Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution continues being raised and over the past month made progress on packaging up various GNOME 45 desktop components, working on stateless system support with systemd, and other features...

The Arch Linux based CachyOS Linux distribution aims to be a "blazingly fast and customizable Linux distribution" that is aggressive with its performance optimizations. CachyOS takes to leveraging compiler optimizations like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO), the BORE scheduler, and also offering package archives compiled for x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 in allowing the distribution's packages to be catered toward newer Intel and AMD processors. In this article is a comparison of CachyOS packages from their main archive, the x86-64-v3 optimized packages, and then the x86-64-v4 wares that can be beneficial for modern Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC / AMD Ryzen systems.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is back at it working on some exciting improvements to Mesa and in particular for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation...

Building upon the existing AV1 encode support for RDNA3 GPUs within the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, AV1 Long-Term Reference "LTR" support is now enabled within Mesa 24.1...

The GNOME Prompt terminal emulator in-development by Christian Hergert with a focus on GPU-acceleration and being a very speedy and beautiful terminal option has been renamed to Ptyxis...

Distrobox is the open-source software making it easy to run any Linux distribution inside your terminal by leveraging Podman, Docker, or Lilipod for containerizing the Linux distribution of your choice. Distrobox works well with a range of Linux distros and has developed quite a following. Out now is Distrobox 1.7 with yet more improvements to this innovative software...

NetBSD 10.0-RC5 was released on Wednesday as what is hopefully the last release candidate...

Mesa 24.0 series release manager Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time bi-weekly point release for this set of open-source GPU user-space driver components. There are many fixes, new Intel ADL-N PCI IDs, and other backported updates for this latest stable release...

Wednesday's small Steam client beta update should fix a crash when starting the Steam client when no OpenGL drivers are found...

It's a big day today in the open-source NVIDIA Nouveau/NVK space... The Mesa NVK driver is now officially declared a Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation by the Khronos Group! In turn the NVK driver is no longer considered experimental and with Mesa 24.1 will build by default for x86/x86_64-based installations...

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed...

Besides the integrated RDNA3 graphics making the Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs interesting, making the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G a fun benchmarking target besides its sub-$200 price tag is having a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C performance and power efficiency when offlining various core combinations on the Ryzen 5 8500G desktop processor.