Phoronix

The Linux kernel's SystemV file-system support for enabling Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS access is being orphaned and in turn could be slated for removal in the future...

Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups...

After going through several release candidates the past few weeks, systemd 253 has officially shipped today as the newest version of this init system and service manager for Linux systems...

For the past few years Ubuntu developer Daniel van Vugt at Canonical has been working on dynamic triple buffering support for the GNOME desktop so that it will switch from double to triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in order to ultimately ramp up the GPU clock speeds / performance state in order to get back to delivering a fluid desktop experience. These triple buffering patches still haven't been upstreamed as of the GNOME 44 release due out next month, but the patches continue to be carried within Debian and Ubuntu among other distributions. An updated version of the code is now on the way to Debian and for April's Ubuntu 23.04 release...

Bavarian Linux computer vendor TUXEDO Computers last year introduced TUXEDO OS as their tailored Linux distribution built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. TUXEDO OS was delivering some performance improvements over stock (K)Ubuntu 22.04, ships with TUXEDO's configuration utilities by default, and other refinements to this desktop OS using the KDE Plasma desktop by default. The team in Augsburg is now preparing to ship TUXEDO OS 2 in the near future while this week they made available a public test snapshot.

A driver submitted for review that hopes to be included upstream in the Linux kernel enhances support for MSI laptops under Linux with more features being enabled...

It's been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 "Kittson" processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users...

Microsoft on Tuesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230208 as the latest version of their in-house public Linux distribution that serves a variety of purposes from the cloud down to the Windows Subsystem for Linux...

While LoongArch merged for Linux 5.19 last year, that initial kernel port to the Chinese CPU architecture wasn't entirely complete and some Loongson 3A5000 features are still being enabled for the mainline kernel. The latest feature work being carried out by Loongson engineers is for supporting hardware virtualization on the 3A5000 processors with KVM...

Patch Tuesday brought AMD disclosing a Ryzen Master security issue on Windows and the Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions bug requiring new handling by Linux's KVM. Over on the Intel side they have disclosed nearly three dozen new issues and as a result also published new Linux CPU microcode files for their recent processors to address the disclosures...

Last year AMD issued an advisory around "intermittent system stutter" when engaging the Firmware Trusted Platform Module "fTPM" with newer Ryzen systems running Windows 10 and Windows 11. While at first this only manifested on Windows, with Linux 6.1+ enabling the AMD fTPM RNG by default when present, this system stuttering issue has begun affecting Linux users too...

If you enjoy the daily open-source/Linux every day of the year on Phoronix along with all of the original Linux benchmarking and hardware review content, you can show your support this Valentine's Day with a special offer...

Yet another prominent open-source software release for Valentine's Day today is... dav1d v1.1! This leading open-source AV1 video decoder is out with its first major update in nearly one year and comes with more AVX-512 tuning as well as more work on Arm NEON optimizations...

Mozilla has pushed out Firefox 110 today as the latest major version of their open-source web browser...

CVE-2022-27672 is being made public today as the "Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions" bug affecting various AMD and Hygon processors. This vulnerability affects the SMT mode where one sibling thread transitions out of the C0 state and the other sibling thread could use return target predictions...

It's GNOME 44 Beta week and today marked the tagging of the beta updates for the GNOME Shell and Mutter...

Following last month's release of Wine 8.0 stable with much of Wine's upstream development being carried out by CodeWeavers employees, CodeWeavers has now released CrossOver 22.1 as their commercial product for enjoying Windows games and applications on both Linux and macOS...

Planning and early preparations are underway to get out XWayland 23.1 as the next feature release by the end of March...

Nearly one year ago with the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS premiere came a beta real-time kernel offered by Ubuntu maker Canonical and intended to help with Ubuntu Linux deployments in industrial environments, automotive, and other sectors with real-time computing needs. This Valentine's Day the Ubuntu real-time kernel has been promoted to general availability (GA) status...

The KDE developers have used Valentine's Day to release Plasma 5.27 as the last feature release of the Plasma 5 series with development attention now turning to Plasma 6.0...

The first beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.2 point release is now available for testing this Valentine's Day with some great features in tow...

New releases of the xf86-video-trident and xf86-video-s3virge X.Org drivers are now available for those still rocking out to old Trident and S3 graphics hardware...

Google engineers last week released libvpx 1.13 as the newest feature release to this library that serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 codecs. While Google engineers have already spent years tuning libvpx for maximum performance with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), the game is not over and v1.13 has yet more tuning there -- along with continued Arm Neon optimizations too...

Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors...

For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users...

Arthur Cohen with Embecosm presented at the FOSDEM developer conference earlier this month on gccrs, the ongoing effort to provide a Rust language front-end to the GCC compiler. While the GCC Rust front-end has been merged for the upcoming GCC 13 release, it's not yet in a state that will really be usable to most Rust developers yet as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing...

It's been a while since there has been any major additions to Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL implementation led by Red Hat's Karol Herbst while today he merged support for SPIR-V programs to this Rust-written driver. This SPIR-V support is necessary for eventually supporting SYCL and HIP...

While initial Rust code was merged for Linux 6.1, it's not yet used by any kernel drivers or functionality for end-users and the integration and other abstractions for Rust are still being established. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle, more of that Rust groundwork is set to be merged and nearing the point of Rust-written kernel modules/drivers will be able to be upstreamed...

While there is a lot to love about RISC-V, with the plethora of RISC-V extensions some of the acronyms are hard to digest. The latest example is the Linux kernel patches for "zisslpcfi", which is the RISC-V extension around Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for RISC-V processors...

The latest Blender Eevee and Viewport module meeting minutes have just been posted and outline the latest thinking around Vulkan API support from the perspective of these modules...

KiCad 7.0 was released this weekend as a "significant upgrade" to this open-source EDA (Electronics Design Automation) suite that can be used for designing PCB layouts, circuit design schematics of varying complexity, and more...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc8 ahead of the planned Linux 6.2 stable release next Sunday, 19 February...

Microsoft on Friday released version 1.14 of their ONNX Runtime, a cross-platform, high performance machine learning inferencing and training accelerator...

Back in 2018 the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) was hosted in A Coruña, Spain by Igalia developers and for XDC2023 it's again returning...

A ten month old merge request to GNOME's Mutter for adding implicit grabbing to the Clutter code was finally merged last week...

HarfBuzz 7.0 is out as a new version of this open-source text shaping library used by software like GNOME, KDE, Chrome OS, Java, Chrome, LibreOffice, and others...

Lutris 0.5.13 Beta is out this weekend as the newest test release for this open-source game manager that makes it easier to install and play video games from multiple game stores, emulators, and integration with other services...

Several years ago the open-source "Hangover" project started as allowing Windows x86_64 and x86 programs to run on 64-bit ARM Linux by leveraging the upstream Wine software as well as QEMU. Hangover also saw work for allowing Windows programs to run on POWER9 Linux hardware and other architectures. The Hangover project has been on hiatus but is now back to being revived...

The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder...

There is already some AVX-512 optimizations for software contained within the FFmpeg multimedia library, but there is room for greater AVX-512 usage especially now with AMD supporting this Advanced Vector Extensions expansion and the latest Intel Xeon CPUs having little associated cost now with AVX-512 use...

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of the XMMS audio player from two decades ago. For those that enjoyed XMMS back in the day, Audacious continues being updated as a modern fork of XMMS...

KDE developers and users are very excited for Plasma 5.27 that will be making its stable debut next week and also serves as the last major release of the Plasma 5 series...

Being worked on actively by a number of stakeholders in recent years has been Flang as a Fortran language front-end to the LLVM compiler stack. While not yet ready for general use, Flang has been making strides as well as showing some promising performance results...

NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest...

Systemd 253 is gearing up for release while out today is the third and possibly final release candidate...

An Intel engineer has implemented compute-based transcoding support to the DXT5 texture format as part of S3TC texture compression. This new path yields a 56% decrease in upload time for a texture upload micro-benchmark when tested on an Intel Ice Lake system with the Iris Gallium3D driver...

This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Apple introduced the Touch Bar to their MacBook Pro laptops a half-decade ago as a dynamic touchscreen to replace the function keys on the keyboard. While some MacBook Pro models have already dropped the Touch Bar for not catching on, some community developers in the open-source Linux community continue work on enabling the functionality for the upstream Linux kernel...

After being in development for nearly one year , Zstd 1.5.4 has been released with many "significant performance improvements across multiple scenarios" for this increasingly-used data compression algorithm...