Phoronix

Longtime X.Org release wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle spent some of his Easter working out new releases of seldom-touched X.Org graphics/display drivers...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3-rc6 for this Easter Sunday as we work towards the official Linux 6.3 debut in the next few weeks...

Going along with other Lunar Lake enablement work that has already been started for the upstream Linux kernel, the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle will see HD audio support enabled for this successor to Arrow Lake...

The Btrfs scrub code that is used for going through file-system data/metadata to verify checksums and repairing damaged blocks is seeing some improvements come Linux 6.4...

While for many months now Intel's open-source driver engineers have been busy getting Meteor Lake Linux support squared away and there has even been some Lunar Lake activity for the Linux kernel going back to 2021, it looks now like their Arrow Lake enablement will be getting underway...

Keith Packard has released Picolibc 1.8.1 as the newest update to his minimal/lightweight libc implementation...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of notable KDE desktop developments for this first week of April...

Following this week's drm-intel-gt-next pull with more Meteor Lake enablement and other new feature code, a final batch of drm-intel-next feature updates were also submitted to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel merge window...

For those Linux gamers making use of Nintendo controllers, a few notable fixes are on the way for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle...

Cloud Hypervisor 31 was released this week as the Rust-written VMM started by Intel that runs atop Linux KVM and Microsoft MSHV while these days is a Linux Foundation project receiving regular contributions from not only Intel and Microsoft but also Tencent, Arm, and other players...

Another tardy Mesa stable release is now available for those wanting to run the latest open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration code on your Linux systems...

In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

As the latest effort in the quest of bringing Rust programming language usage to the Linux kernel, sent out on Thursday were initial patches for bringing Rust infrastructure to the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) framework within the media subsystem...

While going back a year there has been "GFX940" open-source driver work happening within the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU/AMDKFD Linux kernel drivers and the like, only this week was support merged for GFX940 into Mesa...

Earlier this week Intel sent out AMX-COMPLEX support for the GCC compiler as a new instruction set extension for Xeon Scalable Granite Rapids. That enablement work was already merged for the imminent GCC 13 release while now AMX-COMPLEX support has also been added to GNU Binutils...

This week Intel formally debuted its oneAPI 2023.1 Tools package that contains the collection of various compilers, libraries, debugging tools, and related open-source offerings like OSPRay Studio and Embree 4.0...

André Zwing on Thursday released Hangover 0.8.5 as the third alpha release of this software for running Windows x86 32/64-bit applications and Wine on other CPU architectures like AArch64 and POWER PPC64LE...

Last month I wrote about Intel's Linux kernel engineering improvements to help enhance CPU scaling across various workloads by addressing low-level bottlenecks within the kernel. It's an area we'll likely see Intel continue to invest in as Sierra Forest comes next year with 144 E cores per socket. Already with the Linux kernel patches Intel is carrying at the moment via their in-house distribution, there are some significant benefits for Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids. I was curious to see how this Intel-focused work impacted AMD EPYC servers and thus in today's article is a similar analysis using two AMD EPYC 9654 "Genoa" flagship processors while evaluating Intel's Linux kernel optimizations.

Over the years the Free Software Foundation has certified various devices that to their standards "Respect Your Freedom" from USB to parallel printer cables to re-branded and re-flashed motherboards to the Talos II at the higher-end. They've also certified different network hardware and other devices. The newest that they announced today is backing a $99 mini VPN router that supports WireGuard and other solutions...

Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2...

While the release of GCC 13.1 as the first stable GCC 13 compiler is due out in the next few weeks, ahead of that milestone dozens of Rust "gccrs" patches were merged today for furthering along that new language support...

Following the Intel Meteor Lake VPU driver being added to the new accelerator "accel" subsystem in Linux 6.3 along with converting over the Habana Labs AI driver, coming in Linux 6.4 is now the Qualcomm QAIC Cloud AI driver to this subsystem that lives within the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella...

PipeWire 0.3.68 is out today as a significant update for this alternative to JACK and PulseAudio as well as managing both audio and video streams on the Linux desktop...

Intel today submitted their final batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" feature changes that they have planned for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle...

While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support! WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web...

Huawei's Bolt project is a deep learning library focused on high performance and heterogeneous flexibility and supporting a variety of neural networks. Bolt claims to outperform other deep learning acceleration libraries while supporting models from TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe, and more...

VVenC is an open-source project from the Fraunhofer Institute for providing H.266/VVC video encode/decode capabilities. Out today is VVenC 1.8 with the latest enhancements for speeding up CPU-based H.266 video coding...

Ahead of the Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze coming up in the next week or two, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have been landing some last minute performance optimizations to benefit their "ANV" Vulkan driver...

A patch was posted this week introducing a new "hp-wmi-sensors" Linux kernel driver for HP business-class computers for exposing WMI sensor functionality...

While the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D processors went on sale at the end of February as the first Zen 4 3D V-Cache processors, today marks the availability of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor. I've recently been putting the 7800X3D through its paces under Linux and have a plethora of benchmark data to share for launch day.

Following this week's Qt 6.5 LTS and Slint 1.0 Rust toolkit, debuting today is GTK 4.11.1 as the first development release of the new toolkit series in leading up to GTK 4.12...

Ubuntu 23.04 is being talked up for how it can aide developers that want to begin programming with Rust code for Linux kernel modules. It's possible to get started with Rust kernel development on Ubuntu 23.04 thanks to its generic kernel having the necessary kernel configuration, but ultimately it's still in an early state and there isn't much to do with the stock kernel...

Just two months after Zstd 1.5.4 was published, Zstd 1.5.5 has been released as the newest version of this Zstandard compression algorithm implementation. Zstd 1.5.5's release is motivated by addressing a rare corruption bug fix but also has various performance optimizations...

It's been two weeks already since the release of LLVM 16.0 as the latest shiny feature update to this widely-used, open-source compiler stack. LLVM release manager Tom Stellard today issued LLVM 16.0.1 as the first point release with a wide collection of fixes and other maintenance work to LLVM and its contained sub-projects...

Building off last month's release of MidnightBSD 3.0 for this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-forked operating system the v3.0.1 update is now available...

Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms...

Ahead of hopefully enabling the RADV Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries "GPL" support by default for this quarter's Mesa 23.1 release, the RADV driver has now landed on-disk shader caching support for GPL libraries...

The CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is focused on providing new packages and features atop CentOS Stream for use by hyperscalers like Meta and Twitter have now established a "hyperscale-intel" repository for Intel-optimized packages...

While for a number of years now System76 has manufactured their own Thelio desktop line of Linux PCs from their facility in Denver, Colorado (and their Launch Keyboard), they have long talked up ambitions for eventually manufacturing their own Linux laptops rather relying on other white-label manufacturers as they currently do. Today a first glimpse of their in-house laptop prototyping was shared,..

As part of the process for getting Intel's new Xe DRM kernel driver upstreamed as the eventual replacement to the existing i915 driver for Gen12 graphics hardware and newer, Intel engineers on Monday posted the initial Xe DRM scheduler patches that have been separated out to get review on them, figure out what can be common/shared among drivers, and get those bits upstreamed...

NVIDIA has published updated NVIDIA TU10x /TU11x "Turing" GPU firmware to support newer RTX 20 hardware revisions and fix outstanding issues affecting the open-source Nouveau driver...

As I pointed out at the end of March, AMD has begun bringing up a new CDNA GPU in their Linux kernel driver code, past the currently known Instinct MI300 "GFX940" series. This "GFX943" part is some new CDNA multi-XCC accelerator and the open-source AMD engineers have begun posting many patches for this new GPU target. The initial bits of that support will appear in the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle...

A currently-testing implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock has been published for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This Vulkan fragment shader interlock support is used by some game emulators as well as being useful in running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan and similar purposes...

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat's leading Linux input expert, today released xf86-input-libinput 1.3 as the newest version of this X.Org Server driver for making use of libinput in an X.Org Server world...

Wayland 1.22 is now available as the newest feature update to this core set of Wayland protocol and helper code...

Fedora Workstation developers and those involved at Red Hat have been working to improve the state of disk encryption on Fedora with a end-goal of possibly making the installer encrypt systems by default...

The Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 12 "Bookworm" release has reached its release candidate phase...

SUSE announced today the release of "Piz Bernina", its latest quarterly update to the SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform that is working to establish the next-generation SUSE/openSUSE computing platform...

Among the many new features coming in Linux 6.3 -- including many AMD additions -- is the AMD P-State EPP "Energy Performance Preference" support being merged for modern Ryzen and EPYC systems. AMD P-State EPP can further help tune the performance and power efficiency of AMD Linux systems beyond the existing basic AMD P-State driver support and address some existing deficiencies. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD P-State and ACPI CPUFreq driver configurations benchmarked on an EPYC Milan-X server with the in-development Linux 6.3 kernel.

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process...