Phoronix

Back in 2017 was the initial open-source DirectX Shader Compiler milestone and since then Microsoft has continued iterating on it with better Linux support, new features, and ironing out other gaps in this "DirectXShaderCompiler" project. On Friday they released the newest version of this DirectX Shader Compiler that features another newly open-sourced component...

Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a fresh sync of the Asahi Linux AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan driver changes of the work that was being carried by the Asahi Linux development tree and now upstreamed to Mesa proper...

The SystemV file-system that implements Xenix FS, SystemV/386 FS, and Coherent FS is set to be removed from the Linux kernel. The SystemV file-system was orphaned back in 2023 while now is set to be removed entirely after developers realized the code was fundamentally broken...

FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 3 is out this weekend in being the newest weekly development version leading towards next month's stable release to cap off the FreeBSD 13 series...

The Niri and Labwc Wayland compositor projects are both out with new releases this weekend to further their efforts...

In addition to this week's release of Plasma 6.3.1, KDE developers have been busy preparing more bug fixes for what will become Plasma 6.3.2 next month. Additionally, more feature code for Plasma 6.4 continues to bake...

Jean Baptiste Lallement was recently appointed at Canonical as the new Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop. Jean Baptiste Lallement has a decade and a half history at Canonical working on Ubuntu QA, Ubuntu Phone / Unity, and other projects while now he is leading the charge on further enhancing the Ubuntu desktop initiatives. As somewhat of a mid-point for the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle, he published a Discourse post on Friday to outline some of the recent and ongoing improvements for the Ubuntu desktop...

Anticipated for the April release of the Mozilla Firefox 137 web browser is finally supporting HEVC (H.265) video playback in an accelerated manner using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API)...

Following last month's release of Wine 10.0 one month ago, Wine 10.2 is now available as the newest bi-weekly development release that will culminate with the Wine 11.0 stable release in early 2026...

The AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched last year offer excellent performance and power efficiency out-of-the-box. For those wanting to pursue maximum power efficiency and running in the most optimal configuration for performance-per-Watt, AMD EPYC BIOS tunables as well as recent Linux kernel driver improvements can help in driving even greater efficiency. Today's article is a look at the impact of the AMD P-State driver usage and options with recent kernel versions as well as the Power Profile Selection BIOS option for the impact on 5th Gen EPYC performance and power efficiency.

System76 engineers remain quite busy working on their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS operating system as well as other Linux distributions moving forward...

FineIBT is a Linux kernel initiative led by Intel engineers that aimed to combine the best of Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) and Control Flow Integrity. FineIBT was merged in 2022 for the Linux 6.2 kernel as an alternative control flow integrity implementation. Some FineIBT weaknesses were previously addressed but now the implementation has been determined to be "critically flawed" at least until next-generation Intel processors appear with FRED...

We are nearing one year since the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops shipped with Windows 11 ARM. For the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release it's looking like more of these ARM-powered laptops will have somewhat usable support at least for those wanting to avoid Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen laptops...

The latest open-source project enabling Wayland support by default today is PCSX2 as the PlayStation 2 game emulator for Linux and other platforms...

One of the Linux distributions we hear very little about in the industry for cloud/VM usage is Gentoo Linux. But that could change with the Gentoo project now putting out official QCOW2 disk images to make it easier deploying this source-based Linux distribution within virtual machines...

It's looking like Linux 6.15 will be the kernel that does away with the Z3fold and Zbud allocators...

The Ubuntu 25.04 feature freeze is now in effect as Canonical and the Ubuntu Linux developer community work toward releasing the "Plucky Puffin" in April...

Google engineers themselves haven't been energetically pursuing Wayland support within the Ozone abstraction layer for the Chrome/Chromium web browser but thankfully the consulting firm Igalia continues pushing this native Wayland support along. Nick Yamane with Igalia has out a new blog post covering the remaining items being addressed...

The Linux kernel mailing list drama around the Rust programming language use within the kernel continues... Linus Torvalds has largely refrained from the ongoing LKML discussions around a Rust policy for the Linux kernel and in-fighting between kernel developers and maintainers with differing views over Rust. This evening though Linus Torvalds did decide to chime in on the conversation...

Mesa's generic Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has landed support for cl_khr_gl_sharing, the extension that allows using OpenGL buffer / texture / render-buffer objects as OpenCL memory objects for better interoperability between the OpenGL and OpenCL APIs. This is important as in turn it is needed for the Zink driver to be used with the popular DaVinci Resolve video editor application...

Rust 1.85 is out today and it is also the release that stabilizes the Rust 2024 Edition...

OpenRazer 3.10 was just released as the newest update to this set of community-maintained, open-source out-of-tree driver packages for enabling Razer device support on Linux...

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to finally introduce a standardized way of informing user-space of GPUs becoming hung or otherwise unresponsive. This is initially wired up for AMD and Intel graphics drivers on Linux so the user can be properly notified of problems and/or user-space software taking steps to address the hung/unresponsive graphics processor...

Following last week's delay due to a packaging mishap, Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS is available today as the newest point release for this current Long Term Support version of Ubuntu Linux...

SK has been working on a Linux kernel feature dubbed Lazy Unmap Flush "LUF" to defer TLB flushes until folios have been unmapped and freed are eventually allocated again...

On top of all the recent x86/x86_64 Linux kernel crypto improvements made recently by Google engineer Eric Biggers to better laverage AVX-512 and other modern x86 ISA features, a new patch-set posted today by Biggers would help make all x86/x86_64 kernel encryption/decryption at least slightly faster...

The Debian Policy 4.7.1.0 is now available as the updated manual around policy requirements for the Debian distribution for packaging mandates, design issues, and other details to abide by for Debian developers...

A new debug option was merged on Wednesday to Mutter Git ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release. This new debug option is to override the GPU copy mode handling for multi-GPU setups...

Zstandard 1.5.7 was released a short time ago as the newest update to this widely-used compression algorithm backed by Meta. Zstd 1.5.7 packs more than 500 commits, including new performance optimizations and other enhancements...

Just a few weeks after the ROCm 6.3.2 update, ROCm 6.3.3 is out this evening with a few more incremental improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack...

The Fedora Project is rolling out expanded coverage of RISC-V hardware moving forward and making it easier for those with RISC-V developer boards to run Fedora Linux...

Mesa 25.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers used on Linux systems by multiple hardware vendors...

A set of patches were posted today for review by the upstream Linux kernel developers in providing driver support for the Apple web camera and image signal processing (ISP) for Apple M-Series devices. This is enough to get the web camera support working on recent MacBooks while this code is now undergoing review for hopefully being mainlined in the Linux kernel...

VKD3D 1.15 is out today as the newest version of this upstream Wine project for implementing the Microsoft Direct3D 12 APIs atop the Vulkan API for better Windows gaming on Linux and other D3D12 workloads on Linux or macOS when paired with MoltenVK...

The debate over the Linux kernel's Rust programming language policy continues... While some kernel maintainers are against it, Linus Torvalds has reportedly said he would override maintainers that may be against honoring Rust code. Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman has also been a big proponent of Rust kernel code. He's crafted another Linux kernel mailing list post today outlining the benefits of Rust and encouraging new kernel code/drivers to be in Rust rather than C...

One of the most logical paths forward for the Servo web browser engine is making it compelling for embedding within applications as an alternative to the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), WebKitGTK, and other browser engines. Servo developers recently realized though it's around 200 lines of Rust code to embed Servo compared to around 50 lines of C code if targeting WebKitGTK... So improvements are being made to the Servo embedding API...

Manjaro Linux lead developer Philip Muller has provided a status update concerning the upcoming Manjaro 25.0 distribution release...

Yesterday a number of Windows reviews began appearing for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 "Strix Halo" with the debut of the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 as the first laptop to ship this SoC with 16 cores / 32 threads, 64 MB L3 cache, and 40 graphics cores with the Radeon 8060S Graphics. As expected, AMD Strix Halo is a beast with its very capable CPU performance and very compelling integrated graphics, at least under Windows 11...

Intel software engineers on Tuesday released oneDNN 3.7 as the newest version of this oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library that is in turn used by software like ONNX, MATLAB, PaddlePaddle, Apache MXNet, and others as part of the building blocks for deep learning software...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) announced they have begun investing into the Eclipse Foundation and the work they are doing on open-source integrated development environment (IDE) software...

Merged today for the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was yet another AVX-512 optimized code path... Compared to the pure C code, the AVX2 code path was 10.98x faster while this new AVX-512 code path clocks in at 18x the performance of the common C code...

Last week NeatLab released Neat Video 6 as the newest version of their video engine to reduce noise and enhance video quality that can be used with the likes of DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, and Premiere Pro software. Neat Video 6 features a faster render engine, optimized CPU + GPU performance, enhanced memory management, and other improvements. Neat Video 6 continues to support Linux natively when it comes to DaVinci Resolve usage as well as various OFX hosts like Natron / Flame / Mistika / Fusion Studio / Nuke. As they also updated their NeatBench benchmark, I was curious to see how the performance of Neat Video 6 is for the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Blackwell GPUs.

The drama surrounding Rust code within the Linux kernel continues... Christoph Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA mapping helpers and several other areas of the kernel has been an outspoken critic of Rust code or secondary programming languages within the Linux kernel kernel. Hellwig has been critical of Rust code for the Linux kernel and its long-term maintainability. Today he's out with another mailing list post where he notes that Linus Torvalds mentioned in private he would override maintainer vetoes on Rust code within the kernel...

For those interested in WebAssembly for the "run anywhere" prospects and container-like secure execution, Wasmer remains one of the leading WASM runtime options. Wasmer 6.0 Alpha 1 is out today as the latest to further along this quest...

For those that typically wait for the first point release before moving to a new software version, KDE Plasma 6.3.1 is out today with a few dozen fixes for the week since the Plasma 6.3 debut...

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking at including more Intel graphics driver packages as part of the hardware enablement "HWE" stacks shipped as part of Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) point releases. This would provide more comprehensive coverage of newer Intel driver components with future Ubuntu LTS point releases to benefit both the integrated and discrete graphics...

One of the AMD software projects we are very bullish on for the future is openSIL for opening up more of the CPU silicon initialization code for what will eventually replace AGESA across all client and server processors that is aiming for production readiness with Zen 6. In turn, AMD openSIL should allow easier/better Coreboot support. One of the development milestone release targets did slip but they remain working on preparing AMD openSIL releases for Phoenix client and Turin server hardware...

There is an openSUSE project called Reproducible-openSUSE "RBOS" working on a proof-of-concept for constructing openSUSE in a bit-identical manner as part of the broad Reproducible Builds effort to be able to reproduce builds bit-for-bit against what is being compiled by the distribution vendor or other software distribution. The openSUSE RBOS has achieved 100% bit-identical packages as a major milestone...

More than seven years in the making, merged yesterday for PostgreSQL is a self-join elimination "SJE" feature as a performance optimization for some queries...

Following the upstream Wayland Protocols repository landing the Wayland color management protocol for enabling HDR support and this morning's release of Wayland Protocols 1.41, the SDL library and MPV media player are the first two clients supporting this now-official protocol...