Phoronix

In addition to releasing the GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card today (unfortunately, no launch day Linux review, still waiting on hardware...), NVIDIA has released as open-source the RTX Remix software for helping to add path tracing support to classic games...

Intel Foundry Services (IFS) has racked up a big win today with Arm over enabling chip designers to make use of Intel's upcoming 18A process for low-power Arm SoCs...

If Mesa 23.1 couldn't get anymore exciting with RADV GPL support enabled by default, more RDNA3 optimizations, continued Zink optimizations, more Intel DG2/Alchemist enhancements, and a load of other features... Support for RadeonSI with the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver has been merged!..

The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts, which is used by at least a once popular Intel Atom powered Android tablet from a decade prior...

KDE Connect is the great software that allows for interfacing between the KDE desktop and your various mobile devices running Android, Plasma Mobile, Apple iOS, or even Sailfish OS. KDE Connect allows easily sharing files and data with your mobile device(s), receiving phone notifications on your desktop, and a lot of other remote/cross-device functionality. The KDE Connect 2.0 initiative that is taking shape this year thanks to full-time development work is going to modernize this open-source solution...

A new Intel graphics kernel driver patch posted by Intel on Tuesday confirm that upcoming Meteor Lake processors will feature an ADM/L4 cache...

CoreCtrl as the open-source utility for managing your system's performance/vitals and supporting various application profiles has landed in Debian as well as being picked up for easy installation on the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04...

Nginx 1.24 is now available as the newest stable version of this open-source web server and revrse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP caching solution...

With Firefox 112 now released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 113 to beta...

Intel processors should have any CPU microcode updates loaded early during the Linux boot process to avoid various known issues. When "late loading" CPU microcode after the system is up and running, various issues can happen on Intel processors that led them to mark the Linux kernel as tainted under such conditions. Tainting the kernel also happened when late-loading microcode on AMD CPUs but now that's been deemed unnecessary and late-loading CPU microcode on AMD processors is reportedly safe...

For those making use of Mesa's single-file on-disk shader cache, with the upcoming Mesa 23.1 release there will be increased space savings with the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver...

Going back to 2020 Intel's open-source engineers have been working on Key Locker support for Linux for that hardware feature introduced with Tigerlake CPUs. The Key Locker Linux support has been worked on now for nearly three years and finally after a hiatus a new version was sent out after they worked through a significant performance issue now being addressed with forthcoming firmware...

AMD and their partners continue working on bringing up Coreboot for the Ryzen Mobile 7040 Series "Phoenix" support for those very interesting forthcoming mobile processors with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics...

For more than one year and now up to thirteen rounds of patch review, the AMD Pensando Elba SoC support continues in its trek toward the mainline Linux kernel...

The CentOS Project has sent out a reminder of end-of-life dates for CentOS Linux 7 and CentOS Stream 8...

Following some minor delays due to additional release candidates, FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE is now officially available as this latest FreeBSD operating system update ahead of FreeBSD 14.0 debuting this summer...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been leading the Panfrost open-source Arm Mali graphics driver reverse engineering effort the past half-decade is stepping down as maintainer of this driver as part of this also being her last day at Collabora...

NVIDIA launched their SHIELD "Thunderstrike" gaming controller back in 2017 and now in 2023 they are working to upstream their HD driver support for it...

Back in 2021 saw work on CPU cluster-aware scheduling by HiSilicon engineers for Arm processors as well as Intel engineers with a focus on their Jacobsville platform being comprised of clusters of Atom cores. That x86 cluster-aware scheduling was enabled for capable Intel processors while now two years later is being extended for AMD processors...

Just before Christmas Meson 1.0 was released for this widely-used, open-source software build system. Out today is Meson 1.1 as the newest feature update...

Mozilla has published the Firefox 112.0 binaries today ahead of tomorrow's official unveiling...

Theo de Raadt has released OpenBSD 7.3 today as the 54th release for this BSD operating system project...

Intel has released oneAPI Level Zero Loader 1.10 today, which implements the Level Zero v1.6 specification...

In time for the upcoming Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has enabled the graphics pipeline library "GPL" support by default with the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver...

While AMD Zen 4 "Dragon Range" and "Phoenix" laptops are imminent, for those using an older AMD Picasso laptop design from 2019, there are some new Linux fixes on the way for enhancing that older Zen+ experience...

The Intel Media Driver 2023Q1 has been published as the newest feature release for Intel's open-source video acceleration driver providing VA-API support across generations of their integrated graphics as well as newer discrete graphics...

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...