Phoronix

Cloud Hypervisor 38 rolled out this week as the newest version of this Rust-based VMM that was started by Intel while now a Linux Foundation hosted project being worked on by multiple different organizations...

Last April was a display/HDR hackfest hosted in the Czech Republic by Red Hat. Another Linux display hackfest has been announced for this year so upstream stakeholders can collaborate around high dynamic range (HDR) monitor support, color management, variable refresh rate (VRR), and other topics...

With Linux 6.8 the kernel's Rust code was brought up to Rust 1.75 while new patches posted this weekend port the code over to Rust 1.76 and then the upcoming Rust 1.77...

The GNOME 46 beta is out today for featuring the latest fixes and last-minute enhancements to this open-source desktop environment update due out in March...

System76 has been developing the Rust-based COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution but its usage won't be artificially limited to that in-house distro. Among other distributions that have been looking toward packaging it, interest is currently being evaluated in creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) for the COSMIC desktop environment...

The Ubuntu 24.04 LTS desktop installer has rolled out accessibility options built into the initial GUI for helping enable additional features...

While recent graphics cards support GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding, for those still relying on dav1d for CPU-based AV1 decode there is now version 1.4 "Road Runner" available that adds support for LoongArch and RISC-V architectures while continuing to further enhance the performance of this open-source AV1 decoder on x86_64 Intel/AMD processors too...

There is just two weeks to go until the much-anticipated KDE 6 Mega-Release that includes KDE Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6, and the updated KDE Gear apps. KDE developers continue fixing bugs as well as already working on KDE Plasma 6.1 features...

Intel on Friday released Open Image Denoise 2.2 as the newest version of this open-source denoising library used by Blender and other software...

A merge request was opened this week for plumbing fractional scaling support for XWayland clients running on the GNOME Mutter compositor...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner with Intel-owned Linutronix has been spending much time over the past several months reworking the Linux kernel's x86 CPU topology evaluation code. This is to clean-up a mess of aging kernel code as well as some areas of the code being incorrect in today's era of hybrid Intel Core processors with a mix of P / E cores with the E cores lacking SMT/HT and thus throwing off prior kernel assumptions. With the code now queued up in a TIP branch today, it looks like that CPU topology rework could be good to go with Linux 6.9...

The FreeBSD project today issued their Q4'2023 status report that highlights all of their interesting work accomplished last quarter on this open-source platform. Among the interesting achievements were the FreeBSD Foundation sponsoring AMD64 SIMD improvements for FreeBSD 15 that will also be back-ported to FreeBSD 14.1...

Merged to the LLVM compiler stack two years ago was the BOLT tool for optimizing the layout of generated binaries for offering even greater performance than the likes of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) alone. BOLT had been in development for years by Facebook/Meta engineers and has continued to be improved upon for enhancing the code layout of binaries to yield enhanced performance. Recently there's been renewed work on using BOLT to optimize Linux kernel images...

Ahead of the SUSE/openSUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) their engineers have been working on a new web-based OS installer. Originally known as the "D-Installer" and now going by the "Agama" name, this new installer architecture has plans for many architectural improvements this calendar year...

Intel engineers working on their open-source Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver code currently replay captured error state / GPU hangs using a simulator, but a new patch proposal allows for replaying GPU hangs on the actual hardware. In turn this will hopefully help Intel driver developers better address some real-world issues...

Iced is the Rust GUI library that's been gaining quite a lot of interest by Rust developers for creating cross-platform user interfaces. Iced is also what's being used by the Pop!_OS COSMIC desktop environment. Iced v0.12 released yesterday as the first new release for this GUI toolkit since last July...

Valve's Linux graphics driver team has fixed the Vulkan mesh shader support for those using RDNA3 integrated graphics with Phoenix APUs on the latest Mesa RADV driver code...

Vulkan 1.3.278 was published this morning and in addition to the usual documentation corrections/clarifications, there are also two new Vulkan extensions in tow...

AMD on Valentine's Day released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver stack for enterprise Linux operating systems that targets the Radeon RX 7900 series and Radeon PRO W6800 / W7800 / W7900 graphics cards...

GhostBSD as one of the few actively maintained desktop-focused BSD distributions is out with a new release this week...

Following the Linux reviews of the Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and Ryzen 5 8500G Zen 4 + RDNA3 desktop APUs, here is another look at these parts when making use of the lower configurable TDP options for these AM5 chips. All three of these new parts were re-tested at both 35 and 45 Watt cTDPs for seeing the impact on performance and power efficiency.

As part of the AMD color management and HDR efforts worked on by AMD Linux engineers along with Valve and other stakeholders like Igalia developers, Intel engineers have posted their plane color pipeline implementation that follows the cross-vendor API proposal...

AMD made a Valentine's Day announcement of expanding the graphics cards they are officially supporting with ROCm 6.0 as well as adding ONNX Runtime alongside PyTorch to the AI/ML frameworks they are supporting with their open-source software stack...

The folks at iXsystems and Klara are contributing Fast Dedup support to upstream OpenZFS and beginning to roll out this improved deduplication support within TrueNAS SCALE starting next month...

The Qt Creator 13 Beta is now available for testing for this Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE) that also supports a growing number of other programming languages too...

Power-Profiles-Daemon 0.20 has been released as the newest version of this project now living under the UPower umbrella. The Power-Profiles-Daemon allows for exposing power profiles over D-Bus and in turn integrates nicely with the likes of the GNOME Settings...

For those that prefer to wait for the first Mesa point release in a new series before upgrading, Mesa 24.0.1 was released on Wednesday evening with the first batch of fixes for the feature-packed Mesa 24.0...

In recent weeks there have been a lot of open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver patches flying around for the GFX12 graphics engine, Video Core Next 5, and other new graphics intellectual property (IP) blocks that appear to be for next-generation "RDNA4" Radeon graphics. This week yet more patches have been posted publicly...

Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx...

In a Valentine's Day blog post, System76 has outlined how they are nearing the release of their alpha build of the COSMIC desktop environment that they have been developing as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

The Asahi Linux project working on the AGX Gallium3D driver for Mesa has now managed to achieve OpenGL 4.6 conformance as well as OpenGL ES 3.2. This is a big upgrade for the Linux OpenGL support on the Apple M1 as previously only OpenGL 4.1 was exposed...

Earlier this month at FOSDEM in Brussels was a presentation by developers Brendan Abolivier, Ikey Doherty, and Sean Burke on the Thunderbird mail client beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within its codebase...

As an important notice to those with new TUXEDO laptops such as the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 powered by the Ryzen 7 7840HS, installing their DKMS-based driver package can be very important if aiming to achieve maximum performance.

While there is already the work underway on allowing the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel in part to leverage its memory safety potential, a proposal was sent out this morning for a new "SandBox Mode" for the Linux kernel to also increase the memory safety of C code within the kernel...

A new feature coming with the display engine on Intel Lunar Lake's Xe2 graphics is an adaptive sharpening filter that has minimal power and performance impact...

With the Nouveau driver support for using the NVIDIA GSP (GPU System Processor) that was added in Linux 6.7, that is only used by default on the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada" GPUs and moving forward where otherwise there is no accelerated support. The NVIDIA GSP is present in the GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" and RTX 30 "Ampere" hardware too, but not used by default unless setting a module option to enable the mode. However, a new patch is pending that would allow kernel builders to optionally enable the GSP mode by default...

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library used for building deep learning applications is preparing another release that continues going heavy on performance optimizations and preparing for future Intel hardware generations...

In development the past several months has been patches to allow changing the compression algorithm used by the hibernation images of the Linux kernel while preserving the system memory contents. With using LZ4 yields faster system restore times from hibernation than the current de facto compression algorithm used of LZO. This work is now queued for introduction in Linux 6.9...

While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used...

Adding to the list of features slated for the upcoming Linux 6.9 cycle is allowing RISC-V kernel builds to be compiled with Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) enabled...

Kicking off what may end up being a fairly busy Patch Tuesday are two WiFi authentication vulnerabilities being made public that affect Intel's IWD daemon as well as the WPA_Supplicant software -- between the two they are the most common solutions for wireless daemons on Linux systems...

A new blog post was posted by the Redox OS team that is working on their Rust-written micro-kernel designed open-source operating system. Their latest post lays out their porting strategy for getting more Linux and BSD user-space software running on this Rust-based OS...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for providing open-source OpenGL support on Linux systems has implemented indirect draw generation. For software relying heavily on indirect draws will see a "massive boost" in performance...

The FEX emulator 2402 release is now available for this open-source project allowing x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) platforms, including games and the likes of Valve's Steam Play software...

As noted in prior Phoronix articles for months, FreeBSD 14 is likely to be the last for supporting prominent 32-bit systems. On the FreeBSD mailing list more details on the FreeBSD 32-bit deprecation process was posted this week...

It's been nearly one year to the day since outlining intel's AVX-512 powered sorting library to offer blazing fast sort speeds. Over the past year has brought the 1.0 release, new algorithms in v2.0, AVX2 support and more AVX-512 optimizations in v4.0, and now today Intel is out with x86-simd-sort 5.0 with yet more performance improvements...

While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.

At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase...

Samsung engineers have been extending their "samsung" HID driver to support more of their wireless input devices by the mainline Linux kernel...