Phoronix

Vulkan 1.3.249 is out today as the latest spec update for this industry-standard high performance graphics and compute API. Notable with Vulkan 1.3.249 is the introduction of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch...

For those making use of the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for supporting the Radeon HD 2000 series through the HD 6000 series (pre-GCN) graphics cards, Mesa 23.2 is finally ready to drop its TGSI code path for what was once the default intermediate representation (IR) used by Gallium3D drivers but in more recent years NIR has become the preferred IR format...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer and SUSE engineer Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 kernel merge window...

Dragora remains one of the few Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and is a from-scratch distribution focused on providing only free software... The last stable release of the Linux distribution was Dragora 2.2 back in 2012 while out today is Dragora 3.0 Beta 2, which itself is coming three and a half years since the prior beta...

The x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window have landed. This includes numerous x86 laptop driver benefits as well as other new features for the platform-drivers-x86 subsystem...

It's been one month already since the debut of GNOME 44 and out today is the first point release...

When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been pulled into the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel with ASUS Intel/AMD desktop motherboards being the big winners with these driver updates...

There's a bit of Linux kernel code for AMD Zen 2 processors called the "spectral chicken" and a call for cleaning up that code, which was originally written by an Intel Linux engineer, has been rejected...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) device driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.4 merge window...

GCC 13.1 has been released as the first stable version of GCC 13 as this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The xf86-video-ati 22.0 driver has been released as a rare update to this X.Org DDX driver used by older pre-GCN ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards...

In addition to EXT4 seeing some performance optimizations and folio conversion for Linux 6.4, the Btrfs and Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) drivers are also seeing some nice enhancements with this next Linux kernel version...

Last year the Pop!_OS software developers at System76 introduced system76-scheduler as a Rust-written user-space daemon intended to auto-configure CFS and dynamically manage process priorities. They've added various features to improve the Linux desktop responsiveness and performance while today they rolled out system76-scheduler v2.0 as the latest iteration of this process scheduler...

The latest feature planning around Fedora 39 for releasing later this year is around ensuring your EFI System Partition (ESP) is large enough for new functionality moving forward...

Git 2.40.1 is out today due to three new security vulnerabilities being disclosed. Due to those security fixes there are also Git updates for prior stable series with v2.39.3, v2.38.5, v2.37.7, v2.36.6, v2.35.8, v2.34.8, v2.33.8, v2.32.7, v2.31.8, and v2.30.9...

While Intel Shadow Stack support has been around since Tiger Lake CPUs as part of Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), finally for the Linux 6.4 kernel is this security feature being enabled with the mainline Linux kernel...

VA-API has been around for more than one decade as the most common Linux Video Acceleration API that works across multiple GPU/driver vendors. It's been Linux-focused to this point while thanks to the work of Microsoft has begun seeing support on Windows...

The newest feature added by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst to the Rusticl Mesa OpenCL open-source driver is FP64 support...

While often times the EXT4 file-system driver updates for new Linux kernel merge windows can be rather mundane given the maturity of this widely-used Linux file-system, this time around for Linux 6.4 it's a bit more exciting...

For those making use of Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization there are some notable additions to find with the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel...

On Monday the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture code changes were submitted for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel along with the various SoC updates and various platform/machine additions for ARM hardware with this new kernel version...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has received another small but measurable performance improvement for various games...

While Debian and its derivatives are quite popular with ARM single board computers, the ARM64 Secure Boot support has been broken for at least two years. But a fix is on the way and it should appear for this year's Debian 12 "Bookworm" release...

As anticipated the AMD P-State driver extension building out the Guided Autonomous Mode of operation has been sent in as part of the CPU frequency scaling / power management changes for the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel...

Fedora 39 this autumn is looking at boosting its vm.max_map_count default to better match the behavior of SteamOS / Steam Deck and allowing more Windows games to run out-of-the-box with Steam Play...

With the Linux 6.4 kernel there is the ability being introduced so that the machine keyring can optionally only store CA-enforced keys...

The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today...

In clearing up the state of various X.Org packages that have been effectively unmaintained for years, an attempt is being made to better communicate the status of some "retired" X.Org packages that Linux distributions should work towards removing as they are no longer being maintained...

After being deprecated for several years, Security Enhanced Linux "SELinux" beginning with the Linux 6.4 kernel can no longer be run-time disabled...

Open-source Linux graphics driver engineer Melissa Wen with Igalia, Joshua Ashton with Valve, and Harry Wentland with AMD have been working on kernel mode-setting (KMS) color pipeline enhancements for SteamOS and in particular for enhancing the Steam Deck...

Kdenlive remains one of the best available fully open-source non-linear video editing solutions available. With today's release of Kdenlive 23.04 they continue enhancing its feature set and improving the UI/UX for those editing videos on the Linux desktop...

With Linux 6.3 released that marks the opening of the two-week Linux 6.4 merge window. David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates already for Linux 6.4 with the assortment of kernel graphics/display driver updates...

Following this afternoon's release of the Linux 6.3 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 6.3-gnu has already been released as this downstream kernel flavor that removes support for loading binary-only modules and trying to de-blob other driver code that otherwise depends upon "non-free" code...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.3 as the newest stable kernel version...

The Linux 6.3 stable kernel is likely to be released later today so here is a reminder about the most exciting aspects of this spring kernel release...

Libreboot as the downstream of Coreboot focused on ensuring 100% open-source system firmware support without any lurking binary blobs is out this Sunday with a new feature release...

It's been just shy of ten years since Intel launched their Haswell processors that were very successful at the time and was followed by Broadwell. While Intel's open-source Linux driver engineers are primarily concentrated on recent and future Intel hardware platforms, occasionally there is an improvement worth mentioning for mature platforms like Haswell and Broadwell. A new patch series this week will help with some minor graphics power-savings for those still running a nearly decade old Intel Linux laptop...

The Flashrom project that serves as an open-source firmware/ROM flashing utility not only for system BIOS/UEFI on motherboards but also capable of flashing firmware for various network / GPU / storage controller cards and other programmable devices has decided to effectively split into two...

Google engineers continue working on enhancing the Linux infrastructure around supporting High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) for Chrome OS...

Mesa 23.0.3 was released on Friday as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source user-space GPU driver components...

A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps...

Mesa's Zink driver that implements OpenGL atop the Vulkan API has for a while been in wonderful shape for open-source AMD Radeon graphics and even in decent shape for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack while it's also been getting into more robust shape for use on Intel's dedicated graphics cards...

KDE developers were quite busy this week... In addition to shipping KDE Gear 23.04, lots of bug fixing took place this week with around half of Plasma's VHI priority bugs being addressed...

Building off December's release of Manjaro 22.0, this Arch Linux based distribution is out now with its next iteration...

Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted today to address a pressing problem since Linux 6.2...

While Linux 6.2 supports Arc Graphics out-of-the-box and Mesa 23.1 has good OpenGL/Vulkan support, for those running Linux distributions on older kernels and Mesa packages there is less than ideal support -- either no support at all or having to resort to force-enabling the DG2/Alchemist support and potentially running on older OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with various problems. To ease the experience for those running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Intel has been maintaining a packaged version of their DRM kernel driver as a DKMS module as well as updated Mesa packages...

Corsair recently launched their line-up of 2 x 24GB DDR5 memory kits. With recent DDR5 memory prices falling, for as little as $215 USD it's now possible to obtain 48GB of DDR5-7000 RAM. With this being my first time testing a non-binary DDR5 memory kit, here is an initial look at the Corsair CMK48GX5M2B7000C40 compatibility and performance under Linux.

While the upcoming Mesa 23.1 stable release enables RadeonSI build support for Rusticl and is working out overall, the RadeonSI driver with this Rust-written OpenCL driver is nearing the point of officially passing OpenCL conformance...