Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage...
The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization...
Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary...
Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window...
A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding...
As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support...
In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS...
While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled...
The upstream Linux "oxp-sensors" driver began as a driver for supporting the sensors on the OneXPlayer handheld. With time this driver has been extended to support more handheld gaming consoles and a new patch enables support for several more devices...
With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October...
The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations...
Intel software engineers are responsible for many of the great x86_64-related optimizations to the GNU C Library "glibc" over the years. While they've extensively tuned many Glibc functions for achieving peak performance on their modern CPUs, it's a never-ending quest. Merged this week was another optimization to strnlen(), the function for determining the number of bytes in a fixed-size string...
While celebrating the 9th birthday of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released a new version of the Fwupd firmware updating utility...
LibreOffice 24.8 is officially out today as the latest major feature update to this open-source office suite that's the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office. With LibreOffice 24.8 comes many new features throughout its various components...
Intel's uncore Linux platform driver is preparing for a new feature found on newer SoCs: ELC, or Efficiency Latency Control. This ELC feature for the Intel uncore handling allows fine tuning efficiency versus latency characteristics...
As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued...
This week marks nine years since the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was started by Richard Hughes of Red Hat to ease the firmware updating/distribution process with the open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility...
Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems...
Google engineer Qais Yousef has posted a set of 16 patches for the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization code within the Linux kernel to better manage system response time. Schedutil is often used by default on many Linux distributions and with these patches a popular web browser benchmark can be as much as 30% faster with these kernel patches...
Following all of the Snapdragon X1 upstream enablement work over the past number of months by Qualcomm and then DeviceTree additions emerging for enabling the likes of the ASUS Vivobook S 15, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, and Microsoft Surface 7, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is the newest Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop seeing Linux DT support...
Zed, the code/text editor being developed by former Atom editor developers, has continued to gain interest among developers since going open-source, being written in the Rust programming language, and native Linux builds taking shape. The latest feature work on Zed is beginning to integrate AI-powered functionality by leveraging Anthropic's Claude LLM...
Released last month was the VirtualBox 7.1 Beta 1 virtualization software release from Oracle. This new version is bringing a modernized GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing, and other improvements. Released yesterday was the second beta of this big VirtualBox update...
Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop...
Andrea della Porta of SUSE has been working on upstreaming the Linux kernel support to boot the Raspberry Pi 5 on a mainline kernel. Over the past few months Andrea has posted a number of different patches derived in part from Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel code. The latest effort being pursued by the SUSE engineer is on upstreaming Raspberry Pi RP1 PCI device support using a DeviceTree overlay...
As part of my ongoing AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Linux testing, last week I provided a look at the AVX-512 benefits to Zen 5 and also the Windows vs. Linux performance for the Ryzen 9 9950X. For sharing today is a look at multiple Linux distributions up and running on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) desktop. Among the distributions in the mix are Intel's Clear Linux distribution that is optimally tuned for maximum x86_64 Linux performance and once again even on AMD hardware shows the significant benefits to a well-tuned Linux software stack.
Queued yesterday into the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel are some important additions for Intel processors and also an important fix for AMD processors to enjoy package power monitoring...
While the Unigine SDK these days is more known for its simulation and engineering offerings rather than as a game engine, this engine remains visually impressive and continues advancing. Unigine 2.19 has been released that brings a number of improvements to the engine and leaves us clamoring to see a new/updated benchmark...
LunarG engineer Aitor Camacho Larrondo has proposed VK_EXT_external_memory_metal, a new extension for the Vulkan API to allow for more easily sharing memory objects from Vulkan with Apple's Metal...
The FreeBSD open-source operating system project published their Q2'2024 status report that outlines some interesting work happening to this leading BSD project...
NVIDIA recently sent over their RTX 2000 Ada Generation and RTX 4000 Ada Generation graphics cards suited for designers, engineers, and creative professionals. In my testing the past several weeks these professional graphics cards have been working out with NVIDIA's Linux driver stack -- including their open-source kernel modules now the default with the R555 driver series and later. While there is that previous article looking at how their open-source kernel drivers are at parity to the former proprietary kernel modules, today's article is looking at how the NVIDIA RTX 2000/4000 Ada Generation performance stacks up against the AMD Radeon Pro competition.
GameMode as the open-source daemon from Feral Interactive to optimize Linux system performance on-demand when running games is out with its first release of 2024...
If you are picking up one of the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors soon for Linux use, you may be wondering whether it's worthwhile or even necessary moving to the latest Linux kernel code compared to the likes of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS that are shipping a Linux 6.8 derived kernel. Here are some quick benchmarks in looking at that question...
To date the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer has been offered with either 4GB or 8GB of system memory. The Raspberry Pi 5 4GB has retailed for $60 USD while the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB at $80 USD. For those needing something a little cheaper and not needing as much system memory, the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB model launched today...
Arch Linux powered CachyOS that is known for its performance optimizations and other enhancements is out with its "August 2024" rolling release update...
While Linus Torvalds was hoping to merge the sched_ext extensible scheduler for the Linux v6.11 kernel cycle, that didn't end up happening after some technical issues were raised on the kernel mailing list. Since then though the kernel developers have been collaborating and given the latest sched_ext patches with "for-next" and "for-6.12" markings, it's looking like the extensible scheduler will be attempted again for the Linux 6.12 merge window...
Ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc4 kernel release coming up later today, some more Bcachefs file-system patches were merged this weekend for this experimental copy-on-write file-system...
Lab Wayland Compositor "labwc" v0.8 is now available as the newest release of this Wayland compositor that has been re-based against the wlroots 0.18 Wayland library...
Vulkan 1.3.293 released on Friday as the newest specification for this industry standard graphics and compute API. In addition to a handful of fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.3.293 introduces a new NVIDIA vendor extension...
Following the recent work to Mutter and GNOME Shell that was merged for allowing to build with X11 support disabled, the GDM display manager and GNOME-Session code have also seen the ability added to compile without X11 support...
Archinstall is the wonderful command-line driven installer that was introduced to the Arch Linux ISOs three years ago for making it quicker and easier to get a customized Arch Linux installation. Out today is Archinstall 2.8.2 to further refine that experience...
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