Phoronix

Nick Clifton with Red Hat announced today the release of GNU Binutils 2.42, the newest feature release to this collection of binary utilities widely relied upon by Linux and Unix-like systems as part of the compiler toolchain...

Today the review embargo lifts on the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G desktop APUs. Announced back during CES, the Ryzen 8000G series pairs Zen 4 CPU cores with RDNA3 graphics and now also boasting Ryzen AI support too. Today's launch article is focusing on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux performance.

Development on SDL 3 continues as the next major update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer for this hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games and other software...

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there is already a NZXT Kraken Linux driver for supporting hardware monitoring and controls for various NZXT all-in-one CPU liquid cooler products. A new Linux driver was posted today for supporting the latest generation of the NZXT AIO CPU coolers...

While a number of Linux distributions are experimenting with x86-64-v2 baselines or offering x86-64-v3 optimized packages for assuming AVX/AVX2 support by default for their packages, the CachyOS Linux distribution has been experimenting with offering x86-64-v4 packages for those running on Intel or AMD systems with AVX-512 support...

GTK recently merged their new "unified" rendering code with a focus on Vulkan API support and where Linux distributions are now encouraged to build with the Vulkan renderer. Prominent GTK developer Mathias Clasen at Red Hat has written more over the weekend about the state and future of the new Vulkan and NGL renderers...

Ubuntu has long provided a "low-latency" kernel build intended for industrial embedded systems and other latency sensitive environments. Ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical is looking at applying those low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel build...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.8-rc2 as the newest weekly test release of this kernel set to debut as stable in March...

With a goal of delivering a Wayland-only Budgie 10 desktop release later in 2024, Budgie 10.9 debuted today with the early-stage porting work to Wayland...

Now being past the Wine 9.0 code freeze and the bi-weekly development releases back underway with eyes now set on Wine 10.0 next year, the 12th part of the Wine Wayland driver has been published for review. This latest set of Wine Wayland work is on implementing display mode change emulation...

New code submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 cycle are some AMD additions now set for premiering in today's Linux 6.8-rc2 release...

There's been some new work pending for further enhancing the GNOME desktop when it comes around Variable Rate Refresh (VRR). Separately, there's new merge requests pending for adding laptop battery charge threshold controls from the GNOME UI...

TuxClocker as the open-source, hardware/driver vendor independent overclocking and power management control utility for Linux systems is out with a new feature release. This Qt-based utility for enthusiasts continues adding new controls primarily around greater power/performance tunables for CPUs and GPUs...

The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion...

Endeavour OS as the popular desktop rolling-release Linux distribution built upon Arch Linux has published updated ISOs that bundle in the stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well as other package updates...

As some terrific news, Canonical laid out their kernel plans for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and they are being ambitious with plans to ship the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel as their default kernel on this next long-term support Ubuntu desktop/server distribution...

The Budgie desktop that started off as the desktop project within the Solus Linux space has written a lengthy blog post outlining their highlights for 2023 as well as providing a glimpse ahead for 2024. The Budgie desktop is working eagerly on Wayland and XWayland support and hope to advance enough this year to deliver a Wayland-only release...

The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support...

We're nearly one month to the day until the release of the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release alongside the new KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0. Developers aren't letting up at all with more performance optimizations and fixes continuing to hit the codebase...

Following the recent Wine 9.0 stable release earlier this month, Wine 9.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development release in the new series that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 10.0 stable release in early 2025...

While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming...

While not quite as exciting as yesterday's AMD XDNA driver publishing for Ryzen AI on Linux, a notable patch series out of AMD today on the Linux front is enabling AMD Core Performance Boost controls within their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...

Red Hat announced today that beginning April they will be rolling out a new pricing model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux use in the public cloud...

As part of the renewed efforts around the Servo open-source web engine and making it usable for embedded purposes, the Servo engine has been tacking on a number of new features in recent weeks...

Simon Ser just released Sway 1.9-rc1 as the newest test release for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

The uutils project providing a Rust-written Coreutils re-implementation has released v0.0.24 and it passes another 29 GNU test cases as the project nears its 1.0 release...

AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 has dropped as AMD's first open-source Vulkan API driver release of the new year for Radeon graphics on Linux...

With the AMD Ryzen 7040 series "Ryzen AI" was introduced as leveraging Xilinx IP onboard the new Zen 4 mobile processors. Ryzen AI is beginning to work its way out to more processors while it hasn't been supported on Linux. Then in October was AMD wanting to hear from customer requests around Ryzen AI Linux support. Well, today they did their first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver for providing open-source support for Ryzen AI...

Following this morning's embargo lift on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 specification, Mesa merge requests were opened by Intel and RADV stakeholders in beginning to implement the new extensions for these Mesa Vulkan drivers and promoting existing extensions to their newly-minted state...

While we are beginning to see AMD Zen 4C cores in client systems, these smaller cores have already proven themselves very interesting and capable with the AMD EPYC Bergamo high core count server processors and the extremely power efficient EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. For showing how far Zen has come in power efficiency, I thought it would be fun to show how the original flagship EPYC 7601 "Zen 1" processor with 32-cores / 64-threads compared to Zen 4C with the EPYC 8324P(N) 32-core processors. But as that isn't even the top-end Siena part, I also tossed in the 64-core EPYC 8534PN too for a top of stack look for the current EPYC 8004 line-up.

For the better part of two years we've seen Intel open-source software engineers working on preparing the Linux kernel for FRED, the Flexible Return and Event Delivery for defining new transitions for changing privilege levels. Intel's been working hard on the FRED kernel plumbing for better performance, lower response times, and improved robustness and it's looking like FRED could be set to land come Linux 6.9...

The Khronos Group today announced their Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone as a specification for their latest API features and meeting the needs of 2024 graphics processors and other hardware. Vulkan Roadmap 2024 builds upon Vulkan 1.3 and the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 specifications to deliver next-generation capabilities...

GNOME Network Displays is the software that allows streaming your GNOME desktop to WiFi Display devices using PipeWire. Last week GNOME Network Displays 0.91 was released with some big improvements to this software...

In addition to OBS adding AV1 VA-API support, some more good Linux video acceleration news this week is Valve enabling VA-API DRM hardware-accelerated video decoding when using Remote Play with the newest Steam beta...

Intel engineers on Wednesday released OpenVINO 2023.3 as the latest major update to this leading open-source AI toolkit. The OpenVINO 2023.3 brings "full support" for new Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake processors, other Intel hardware support improvements, and continuing to expand support around generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs)...

Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series...

Earlier this month the GCC 14 compiler landed initial support for AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics processors as part of the GNU Compiler Collection's OpenMP device offloading support for GPU compute. That initial support was rather basic but a follow-up patch has the possibility of making the RDNA3 (GFX11) support "working for most purposes" and will hopefully still be merged in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release...

The Zed code editor being led by the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework have announced today that the Zed editor is being open-sourced...

AMD announced back during CES the Radeon RX 7600 XT as a $329 USD graphics card for 1080p/1440p gaming. Today that card goes on sale and the review embargo has lifted. Here is an initial look at the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT performance under Linux with AMD's open-source driver stack.

For going along with today's GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features...

Teflon has been merged into Mesa 24.1 as a Gallium3D front-end that TensorFlow can load for delegating the execution of operations in a neural network model. Teflon was created initially for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for being able to run AI inferencing on Vivante NPUs...

Red Hat's Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.9.12 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution that is developed along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for simplifying system firmware and peripheral/device firmware updates under Linux...

Following discussions from last year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver has been proposed for the Linux kernel. This driver would expose /dev/ntsync as a new character device for implementing some of the Windows NT synchronization primitives directly within the Linux kernel. In turn this would help the performance of some Windows games/applications running on Linux via Wine and in some cases would mean significantly better performance...

The cross-platform OBS software that is popular with game streamers and others live-recording their desktops has finally landed support for AV1 video encoding using Linux's Video Acceleration API (VA-API) interface...

AMD's GPUOpen team today released version 1.4.33 of the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. The AMF SDK continues to be focused on delivering optimal access to AMD hardware for multimedia processing under both Windows and Linux...

While AMD's GPUOpen team developed the Radeon Memory Visualizer for their own Radeon graphics processors, thanks to the software working out well and being open-source and the profiling/dump format being public, the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver has added support for it. With the Intel ANV Mesa driver you can now generate Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) compatible dumps that can then be loaded into the GPUOpen software for analyzing the video memory behavior of Intel's integrated and discrete graphics...

In addition to Firefox 122 making it to stable today, Google has also promoted their Chrome 121 web browser to its stable channel...

It's 2024 and sadly the real-time (RT) patches still have yet to be mainlined for the Linux kernel. At least though the out-of-tree patches continue to be quickly re-based and decrease in size over time... Out today is the Linux v6.8-rc1-rt1 patches for bringing the real-time support against the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel...

The review embargo has now expired on the Framework Laptop 16, the latest innovative and upgradeable laptop from this company that has made quite a name for itself with modular and user-upgradeable laptop designs for both AMD and Intel. The new Framework Laptop 16 offers even more customizability around the keyboard/touchpad and other options including over using a Radeon RX 7700S graphics module and more. Besides the immense customizability options and upgrades available with the Framework Laptop 16, the new model employs the AMD Ryzen 7040HS processor for even greater performance over the AMD Ryzen 7040U found with the latest Framework 13 model.

Over the weekend I shared some benchmarks showing some nice performance gains with Linux 6.7 over the 6.6 kernel when running on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X HEDT processor within the new System76 Thelio. So now you may be wondering about the performance with the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel... Here are some early tests there...