Phoronix

The Meson build system continues enjoying terrific developer adoption and that's even prior to declaring a "1.0" version. However, that's about to change with Meson 1.0-rc1 having now been issued for testing...

Following the recent developer talk of looking to drop SLOB from the Linux kernel, this simple allocator is being deprecated come Linux 6.2...

Today marks the release of KDE Frameworks 5.101, which is notable in that this is the point that feature development on KDE Frameworks 5 is now effectively over. The focus now turns to KDE Frameworks 6...

The long-awaited Godot 4 open-source game engine release is getting closer... The developers have already begun drafting plans past Godot 4.0 and they have now moved to weekly development snapshots as this much anticipated release nears...

The belated Mesa 22.2.5 is now available as the last planned point release to the Mesa 22.2 series...

KDE developers remain quite busy as we approach the holiday season. KDE's Spectacle screenshot utility has seen some new work and there were various other fixes and improvements to be merged this week...

As planned the first release candidate of Wine 8.0 is now available that marks the culmination of the Wine 7.xx bi-weekly development releases and now onto the strictly bug-fixing phase before introducing Wine 8.0 as stable in early 2023...

The Qt6 toolkit introduced the notion of platform-specific objects via the QNativeInterface namespace and now set to come with Qt 6.5 is support for a Wayland native interface for application developers wanting to interact directly with Wayland object handles...

Recently there have been a number of Phoronix readers writing in about CachyOS, an Arch Linux based distribution that is new and is focused on " better speed, security and ease of use," So of course there has been requests to see how well CachyOS performs against other distributions... In thus article is an initial look at the CachyOS performance compared to that of also Arch Linux based Endeavour OS, Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora Workstation 37, and then Intel's Clear Linux that is already well known for its performance attributes.

PipeWire 0.3.62 is out today as the newest feature and bug-fixing update to this open-source project that has begun conquering the Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams...

NVIDIA has released CUDA 12.0 as the latest major feature update to their proprietary compute API...

Ahead of next week's Radeon RX 7900 series hitting retail availability, AMD today issued a new AMDVLK driver update as their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver...

While Linux 6.1 is introducing many new features, for the Linux 6.2 merge window beginning next week there is a lot more on tap. Linux 6.2 has a lot of exciting additions expected from new low-level software features, continuing to lay more Rust code, new hardware support, stable Intel Arc Graphics support, and a ton more. Here is an early look at some of what is expected...

AMD engineers on Thursday released AOMP 16.0-3 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream focused on providing the latest patches for enjoying AMD Instinct / Radeon OpenMP offloading as part of their ROCm compute stack...

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221203, a new version of its in-house Linux distribution fulfilling a variety of internal needs...

Hot off the release of Blender 3.4, Blender developers have begun discussing the possibility of raising their CPU requirements moving forward for making use of this open-source 3D modeling software...

One of the new Linux 6.1 features was set to be enabling HID++ support for all Logitech Bluetooth devices by default rather than the current enabling it on a per-device basis. But this change turned out to be too opportunistic and now days ahead of the Linux 6.1 stable debut has been reverted...

Going back to the summer Intel posted their initial open-source Linux driver for their Versatile Processing Unit "VPU" debuting with Meteor Lake. Since then they have continued refining this open-source VPU Linux driver and with the latest patch series have adapted it to make use of the new accelerator framework/subsystem premiering in Linux 6.2...

Ahead of the holidays there is a new Vulkan API spec update from The Khronos Group...

At the start of November AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 series while these high-end RDNA3 graphics cards will go on sale next week. Both the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are at Phoronix for Linux testing with AMD's fully open-source graphics driver stack while today the embargo expires on showing off the hardware.

PHP 8.2 is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language primarily for web purposes...

With the Linux 6.1 kernel set to be released this weekend, here is a look back at the prominent changes to find with this kernel. Linux 6.1 besides being the last kernel version of the year is all the more important in that it's expected to be the new Long Term Support (LTS) kernel...

Thanks to the work led by Valve engineers on the open-source Linux graphics stack, Mesa 23.0 continues picking up new features for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver...

While Intel's GPU compute stack for Linux is fully open-source, one area where it still has room for improvement is getting it packaged up on more Linux distributions. The reference binaries published by Intel for their Compute-Runtime and Level Zero components are just Debian/Ubuntu packages but with time -- and as Arc Graphics and other hardware becomes available -- we are seeing more distributions taking a stab at offering up their own package builds...

For those running an AMD Ryzen 5000 series "Cezanne" powered laptop, squeezing into the kernel this week ahead of the Linux 6.1 debut on Sunday is a suspend/resume fix affecting various models...

Fwupd 1.8.8 is available today as the newest update to this excellent solution for allowing system and device/peripheral firmware updates to happen under Linux and other platforms when paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)...

With the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that has come together over the past year and improved upon there has been the Energy Performance Preference "EPP" mode being worked on recently to further improve the performance/power characteristics of Ryzen and EPYC processors on Linux. A new patch series today implements a third mode for the AMD P-State driver...

A recurring question that has come up by readers since the recent launch of the Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors has been whether it's still worthwhile running with the "mitigations=off" Linux kernel option to disable software-controlled CPU security mitigations to increase performance. For production systems that is never recommended due to the security risk, but for those wondering, here is a brief look at the mitigation situation on Raptor Lake with the flagship Core i9 13900K.

Blender 3.4 is now available as the latest feature release for this increasingly popular, industry-supported open-source cross-platform 3D modeling software...

Following the initial AMD Zen 4 "znver4" target for GCC 13 that was published and merged in October (and now a SUSE engineer working on providing actually tuned support and accurate cost tables), an initial AMD Zen 4 patch for the LLVM/Clang compiler was published a few days ago...

With the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle the Apple Silicon CPU frequency scaling driver is set to be mainlined for further improving the Apple M1/M2 SoC support on the mainline kernel...

The first beta of OpenVPN 2.6 is now available and it's a big one for those using this cross-platform, virtual private network (VPN) system...

The Asahi Linux distribution is now shipping an early, alpha quality graphics driver stack for the Apple M1/M2 SoCs. This work-in-progress driver consists of their experimental Rust-written DRM kernel driver and then the AGX Gallium3D code in Mesa that is currently targeting OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support...

In addition to today seeing the GCC Rust front-end being declared ready for merging with its latest patch series sent out today, the Modula-2 front-end sent out its third revision which is also expected to now be merged as another new programming language front-end for GCC 13...

Among the many exciting new features in Linux 6.1 is the merging of the Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" code as what has shaped up to be one of the best kernel innovations for 2022 for overhauling the Linux kernel's page reclamation code. The performance results already are very promising and MGLRU is being used successfully at Google and other large deployments. The work isn't over though on further advancing the kernel in this area...

Among the early pull requests sent out already ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window opening next week is a change to enable "-funsigned-char" by default for Linux kernel builds. In preparation for this compiler flag change several fixes have already landed along with a lot of early testing, so any fallout is hoped to be minimal...

Back in October AMD sent out their initial Zen 4 "znver4" enablement for the GCC compiler. That initial Zen 4 support was since merged for GCC 13 but that initial enablement carried over the cost tables from Zen 3 and didn't do much in the way of tuning but rather just flipping on the new instructions supported by the Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 9004 series processors. Today there is finally some juicy tuning patches being sent out for GCC...

The GCC Rust front-end that provides very preliminary support for the Rust programming language atop the GNU Compiler Collection is now cleared for merging to the mainline codebase!..

FEX-Emu is the open-source software project working on speedy x86/x86_64 software emulation on AArch64. FEX-Emu is one of the leading options for running x86 binaries on 64-bit Arm and has matured enough for allowing Linux games and Steam Play titles to run on Arm. FEX 2212 is out as the newest shiny feature update to this promising software...

One of the big undertakings this year within the (open)SUSE camp has been the YaST team's work on D-Installer as their next-generation operating system installer. This week they have published a new prototype of this installer with more functionality now in place...

Ahead of LibreOffice 7.5 expected to be released in February, today marks the availability of the first alpha build available for testing...

For FreeBSD users not yet on the FreeBSD 13 stable series, FreeBSD 12.4 is now available as the newest point release to that N-1 series...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor...

Armbian 22.11 is now available as the Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distribution popular with ARM development boards and supporting a wide range of hardware from different vendors...

Back during the summer once Asahi Linux introduced initial Apple M2 SoC support I ran many Apple M2 Linux benchmarks including a look at how the M2 competes with AMD and Intel laptop processors. With months having passed since then and the Apple M1/M2 Linux support has continued to advance upstream as well as more work hitting the Asahi Linux tree, here is a fresh look at where the performance of the M2 is currently at compared to that initial at-launch support.

Released this morning is Intel IGC 1.0.12504.5 for Linux and Windows systems as the newest version of the open-source Intel Graphics Compiler. As the first tagged update in nearly two months, IGC 1.0.12504.5 is a big one...

PoCL 3.1 is out today as the newest feature update to the "Portable Computing Language" that is effectively a portable OpenCL implementation that originally began focused on being a CPU-based implementation of OpenCL and has grown to support additional back-end drivers via LLVM for targeting NVIDIA CUDA, an experimental Vulkan driver, and other accelerator targets...

Last month I wrote about Intel having worked on USB4 wake-on-connect and wake-on-disconnect handling for the Linux kernel and those patches are indeed primed to be introduced next week with the Linux 6.2 merge window...

As we get ready to enter 2023, the Linux kernel's floppy disk driver is still being maintained...

While X.Org Katamari releases are no longer being organized to bundle up all of the different X11 software components behind one version number and some X.Org software pieces are seeing very seldom updates every number of years, this past week has seen twenty new X.Org software releases...