Phoronix

This New Year's weekend brought the latest AMD patches working on plumbing the mainline Linux kernel with the hypervisor support around AMD Secure Nested Paging (SNP) as part of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). SEV-SNP has been supported since EPYC 7003 series and while some elements of the support have been upstreamed for securing VMs, some bits remain...

With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator...

The Xiph.Org project Rav1e to provide the fastest and safest AV1 encoder by leveraging the Rust programming language is ending out 2023 with a new feature release...

Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics...

In addition to Ubuntu exploring the possibility of x86_64-v3 builds/packages, a proposal has been raised for Fedora Linux with its current Fedora 40 cycle to provide the ability to offer optimized x86_64 (AMD64) binaries based upon the CPU's x86_64 micro-architecture feature level...

ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles...

Added last year to the open-source compilers were Intel RAO-INT instructions for upcoming Intel CPUs. RAO-INT as new atomic ADD / AND / OR / XOR instructions were to debut with Intel's Grand Ridge SoC but now that is apparently no longer the case...

Merged on Friday for Mesa 24.0-devel in Q1 is support for the VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix extension with Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...

LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series...

Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 Focal is out today as the UBport's latest release of this Ubuntu mobile adaptation for smartphones and tablets. This is the third release to be based on their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, which is quite aging at this point but still better off than their earlier 16.04 LTS foundation...

The Gentoo Linux project's Portage package manager has long supported the ability to deal with binary packages while moving forward they are finally leveraging that to offer binary packages for download and direct installation...

Yesterday I ran through a number of benchmarks looking at how the Intel integrated graphics have evolved from the Gen9/Skylake era through the new Meteor Lake CPUs with integrated Arc Graphics. While carrying out those graphics tests with being infatuated by the performance and power efficiency of Meteor Lake integrated graphics, I also took the opportunity to run 100+ CPU benchmarks on each of these laptop CPUs / Intel mobile processor generations being tested. Here's that look at the Intel CPU performance and power efficiency comparison from Whiskey Lake to Meteor Lake.

With my Intel Meteor Lake benchmarking that began last week with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H within an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the area I've been most impressed by so far with this new generation of Intel mobile processors is the integrated Arc Graphics performance. In a prior article I showed how Intel Meteor Lake graphics are a big upgrade and now competing with AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics while also capable of delivering better power efficiency. That led me to some curiosity-driven holiday benchmarking to show how Meteor Lake graphics have evolved over the past several generations of Intel mobile processors.

Similar to Intel and AMD processors with not all cores necessarily being created equal, Zhaoxin engineers are working on plumbing preferred core support for their processors into the Linux kernel...

As it's been a while since last delivering any competitive GCC versus LLVM Clang compiler competitive analysis and with the year quickly drawing a close, here's a fresh look at the GCC vs. Clang C/C++ compiler performance of various resulting application binaries tested on x86_64. GCC 13 vs. Clang 17 were tested as what's readily available on Ubuntu 23.10 Linux plus a look ahead in using the latest GCC 14 and LLVM Clang 18 development snapshots as of this week.

After looking yesterday at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of 2023, here is a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the more than 2,780 original news articles authored on Phoronix this calendar year...

Eric Engestrom has issued an on-time bi-weekly point release for the Mesa 3D graphics drivers today principally composed of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers commonly used by the Linux desktop...

One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.

Over the course of 2023 I authored 180 Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles, not to mention the thousands of original open-source/Linux news items. As we are about to hit the end of 2023, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of the year...

As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate...

Nobara 39 was released today as this modified Fedora Linux downstream that focuses on adding user-friendly fixes and various gamer/enthusiast type desktop optimizations...

With all of my initial Intel Core Ultra 7 155H benchmarking since last week from the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance to the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance it was at the Linux 6.7 kernel defaults / OS defaults. But for those wanting to push the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H further for better performance or conversely wanting to extend the battery life further for devices like the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) can be adjusted. Here's a look at the sometimes significant difference to power and performance when adjusting the Intel Meteor Lake CPU between the default balanced performance mode and the alternative power saver and performance modes.

One of the big milestones we are looking forward to in 2024 is the introduction of AMD Zen 5 processors. AMD Linux engineers have in recent months begun getting ready for those next-generation processors that look like will be Family 26 (1Ah) processors. We've been seeing more of the AMD "1Ah" patches and some more were posted today for some post-Christmas excitement before the new year...

Similar to the long-worked-on GNOME dynamic triple buffering that is applied when the (most commonly integrated) graphics fall behind schedule in rendering the desktop, a merge request for KDE's KWin compositor has also seen similar work in this area for helping the iGPU catch-up in rendering via a "triple buffering" implementation...

Intel Linux engineers continue eagerly working on the Compute Express Link (CXL) code for the Linux kernel with more server hardware coming to market supporting this high-speed open standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections...

As part of AMD's Platform Management Framework (PMF) and working on new Ryzen features like the Smart PC Solutions Builder, a set of patches are queued up ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle support for policy binary support with the PMF driver...

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation...

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors...

Along with all of the other ongoing Intel Arrow Lake processor/platform enablement, the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel will have the sound driver support ready for landing...

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to those celebrating any end-of-year holidays. In case you missed last month's cyber week special for a discounted rate on going ad-free, native dark mode, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits, it's back for Christmas week...

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations...

Intel's open-source Linux drivers for OpenGL (Iris) and Vulkan (ANV) this week for Mesa 24.0 received support for dual-SIMD8 dispatch on Gen12 graphics (Tigerlake) and newer...

While the Linux 6.7 release is being pushed back by one week due to the holidays and in turn the Linux 6.8 merge window not officially opening until 8 January, some pull requests do end up getting submitted early. The 1-wire bus driver changes for Linux 6.8 were sent out this week and most notably includes adding the AMD AXI 1-wire host driver...

With the Linux 6.7 kernel there is now KVM virtualization support for LoongArch CPUs. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, that KVM support is being further extended for these RISC-V-inspired and MIPS64-derived Chinese processors...

New upstream Linux kernel releases are typically issued on Sunday evenings (US time) but Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.7-rc7 a day early in preparations for Christmas Eve festivities...

It's been two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.25 and now just ahead of Christmas there is Enlightenment 0.26 released by Carsten Haitzler...

Following discussions with upstream developers, LLVM is changing its versioning as part of the branch creation process to better distinguish mainline development builds of LLVM against those from stable (or soon to be stable) release branches...

With a set of input driver patches set to be merged today for the Linux 6.7-rc6 kernel, the XPad driver is adding support for Razer's Wolverine V2 Xbox controller...

This week brought the second beta of KDE Plasma 6.0 along with KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks updates too. The holidays haven't resulted in KDE development slowing down too much with still a number of bug fixes being merged this week and other minor enhancements...

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager...

For those still relying on GNU Autoconf for generating configure scripts for building/installing/packaging software rather than more modern alternatives like CMake and Meson, Autoconf 2.72 is out today as a nice holiday treat...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 9.0 is now available for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

In helping to guide Intel's open-source interests in 2024, the company is hosting an Open-Source Community Survey. Intel is looking for feedback from open-source developers and other community stakeholders about your principal interests and concerns...

With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer...

One of the new features to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the merging of the experimental "Xe" Intel kernel graphics driver. This driver has been in development for quite a while but has reached the state now at which Intel is comfortable with developing it further while in the mainline kernel tree.

Here's a pleasant Christmas present and one I certainly wasn't expecting... Motherboard manufacturer ASRock has announced software for Linux! Well, not any motherboard management/configuration software for their desktop motherboards or anything like that but rather a Linux port of their AI QuickSet software that is intended to help users "experience AI in one click."..

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers has announced TUXEDO Control Center 2.1 as their newest update to this software for managing your notebook's vitals from the Linux desktop...

The latest bits of future Intel CPU hardware support being queued for the mainline kernel is adding Intel Idle driver support for the upcoming Sierra Forest and Grand Ridge processors...

One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat's former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years...