Phoronix

As covered a few days ago on Phoronix, there's been early progress on HDR display support for the KDE desktop among other highlights this week...

Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture...

While the Vulkan high performance graphics and compute API is backed by many vendors, Microsoft and Apple are two notable organizations that haven't backed this Khronos Group standard. For Microsoft's part, they obviously prefer their in-house Direct3D. However, Microsoft is making preparations for submitting their first Vulkan extension...

Ivan Orlov this past week posted the patches for VALSA, the Virtual ALSA sound driver that aims to help Linux kernel developers in testing and fuzzing of the sound subsystem...

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux...

CodeWeavers, the company known for its CrossOver software for running Windows games/apps on Linux / macOS / Chrome OS and in turn being the main corporate backer to the Wine project, is now transitioned to being an employee ownership trust. This comes with Jeremy White deciding to leave the company after 27 years...

Due to the constantly evolving state of the open-source Linux graphics drivers in particular, here is a fresh look at an assortment of AMD Radeon GPUs making use of the Mesa 23.2 development code for the newest RadeonSI and RADV drivers paired with the recently released Linux 6.3 kernel. These open-source Radeon Linux gaming benchmark results are going up against various NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series graphics cards using the NVIDIA 530.41.09 release as its latest Linux driver.

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors...

There's been a Fedora 39 proposal under evaluation for boosting the kernel's vm.max_map_count to help with some Windows games on Steam Play. Though concerns were raised that bumping this kernel tunable too high may not be wise. As such, further testing is to happen for tuning Fedora's stock vm.max_map_count value...

Nearly forty years after the MIDI digital music protocol was first introduced, in 2020 the MIDI 2.0 protocol was announced as a major overhaul for this widely used standard by musical devices. A big patch series sent out today prepares the Linux kernel sound drivers for MIDI 2.0...

Intel's open-source Mesa Vulkan Video driver "ANV" has added support for H.265 (HEVC) video decoding...

Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn't always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability...

Ampere Computing announced this morning that their AmpereOne family of processors have entered production and provided additional details on these in-house designed Arm server processors.

The sdl12-compat project that implements the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for better game compatibility on modern Linux systems is out today with a new pre-release...

NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 4060 series consisting of the $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB while in July an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB version will come along with a $299 RTX 4060...

Following last month's Red Hat hosted HDR hackfest that brought together many Linux desktop stakeholders from GPU driver developers to desktop environment developers, KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared an update on the progress being made for high dynamic range (HDR) display support from the KWin side...

With development of the MIPS architecture having officially ended two years ago in favor of focusing on RISC-V for future CPU designs and the overall decline of that CPU architecture, it's been years since the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has seen its MIPS code well maintained. However, now a capable developer has stepped up willing to serve as the GCC maintainer for MIPS...

Earlier this month Red Hat released RHEL 9.2 and at the same time they also released RHEL 8.8 for those continuing to rely on the stable RHEL8 series. AlmaLinux managed to provide a same-day release of AlmaLinux 9.2 while now one week later they have also shipped AlmaLinux 8.8...

Valve released a new Steam client beta overnight and contains a few notable fixes for NVIDIA Linux gamers...

Weston 12.0 as Wayland's reference compositor is now available with multiple GPU support in the DRM back-end, support for HDMI content types, support for the Wayland tearing control protocol, plane alpha DRM property handling, a PipeWire back-end, and much more...

I spent the past few weeks testing the latest System76 Pangolin laptop that has been working out well as an all-AMD 15-inch laptop running the company's increasingly-popular Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

While for an Ubuntu desktop user that is used to running Snap versions of Firefox and other desktop application sandboxing it may seem strange for Canonical to be comparing Snaps to Docker containers, the emphasis of their comparison is on the IoT/edge computing side where they are trying to better position Snaps as a superior alternative to using Docker containers...

The OpenBMC Linux Foundation collaborative project providing an open-source operating system / firmware stack for server baseboard management controllers (BMCs) is out with version 2.14. The OpenBMC release management still seems to be in a bit of disarray with OpenBMC 2.13 also having been released yesterday, but at least the code continues moving along...

The folks at OnLogic have released the Axial AC101 as a new edge server offering that is powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" processors and this BMC-enabled, shallow-depth server can accommodate up to 150 Watt PCI Express expansion cards in aiming to make this compact edge server ideal for machine learning, AI, and other IoT use-cases...

PipeWire 0.3.71 is out today as the newest update to this now widely-used open-source solution for managing Linux audio and video streams and serving as a viable replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK for audio needs on the Linux desktop...

The Intel Compute-Runtime 23.13.26032.30 update was released today as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. With this release comes various improvements and new features like FP64 emulation for Arctic Sound M...

Libei has been the multi-year effort by Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer on emulated input handling for Wayland. Libei consists of a client side library and EIS as the "Emulated Input Server" for this Wayland-focused emulated input device solution. Libei 1.0 is about to finally be released...

The Debian Technical Committee has voted to reinstate the merged-/usr file movement moratorium...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 and AlmaLinux 9.2, Rocky Linux 9.2 is now also available as this alternative community-supported flavor of RHEL...

Lutris 0.5.13 is now available as the newest feature release for this open-source game manager...

A set of patches to the Intel Uncore Frequency (intel-uncore-freq) Linux driver are expected for the Linux 6.5 cycle that integrate support for the TPMI interface and prepare for upcoming processors with cluster-level power controls...

While the Loongson 3A6000 processors have yet to be officially launched, rumors since last year put it on target for launching in the first half of this year and some claims that there is such performance uplift that these Chinese CPUs could rival AMD Zen 3 or Intel Tiger Lake levels of performance. Ahead of the 3A6000 series launch, Linux patches have begun appearing for these next-gen LoongArch processors...

SQLite 3.42 is now available as the newest update to this widely-used, embed-friendly SQL database option that is used by countless applications and other software for lightweight and speedy data storage purposes...

Months in the making have been the patches for x86_64 parallel CPU boot support to allow secondary CPU cores to be booted in parallel for shortening Linux kernel boot times. Over time the Linux parallel CPU bring-up patches have gone through many revisions while it looks like this work is now positioned for introduction with the Linux 6.5 kernel later this summer...

This Friday is the planned Git packaging migration for the Arch Linux distribution that will see some repository splits as well as discontinuing SVN access...

The PXP project has been an interesting language effort in recent times that aims to become a superset of PHP with additional syntax options and greater run-time capabilities. PXP 0.0.1 was released yesterday as the first very early, pre-production release for this open-source project...

Libproxy as the open-source library providing automatic proxy configuration management on Linux, Windows, and macOS systems has seen a big update thanks to an unlikely contributor...

One of the great longtime features of Ubuntu Linux has been Launchpad's Personal Package Archives (PPAs) for easily augmenting the official Ubuntu repositories with additional packages either to supply updated versions of select software or for software not yet found in the official Ubuntu archives. With Ubuntu 23.10 a change is being made in how PPAs are managed to enhance the security and reliability...

Ahead of Debian 12.0 releasing in June, a third release candidate of the Debian 12 "Bookworm" installer has been released...

With LLVM Clang's C++23 support coming together and the -std=c++23 option now exposed, LLVM Clang 17 Git has already added its initial options for specifying what will be C++26 / C++2C support...

Following the SFC vote last year for accepting Sourceware.org into the conservancy, everything is all set now and Sourceware.org is now officially part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Red Hat was traditionally the long-time sponsor of Sourceware.org that hosts many open-source projects like GCC and Cygwin...

A new release of TornadoVM is now available, the open-source plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM to allow for Java code to run on heterogeneous hardware with ease -- including various GPU models as well as FPGAs...

The AMD EDAC Linux driver for Error Detection And Correction of AMD x86_64 CPU/memory errors is now being extended for handling AMD data center GPUs like the Instinct MI200 series and newer where any error reporting/correction information can now be propagated to this existing driver...

Coreboot 4.20 has been released as the newest feature release for this project continuing to provide open-source system firmware/BIOS for Chromebooks, servers, and a range of laptops and desktops...

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the small but useful VK_EXT_tooling_info extension...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 8.8 is the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend that carries hundreds of extra patches atop this open-source software for leveraging Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.4-rc2 as the second weekly release candidate of the in-development Linux 6.4 cycle...

In addition to Microsoft having a significant present at last week's Linux Security Summit, there were also multiple Microsoft engineers at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit that was also taking place in Vancouver. Among the Microsoft Linux talks this week was a presentation on the Linux kernel usage by WSL2 -- including how it's moving closer to a mainline/upstream status and also mentions of Linux kernel features loved by Microsoft's engineering team...

Sent out this morning were the x86/urgent patches for the Linux 6.4-rc2 kernel due for release later today. With the x86/urgent changes this week are just two AMD patches in preparing the kernel for Family 19h Model 78h processors...