Phoronix

While Ubuntu 23.10 isn't a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, for those curious about the evolution of Ubuntu Linux performance for Intel Xeon Max (Sapphire Rapids with HBM2e) on this new release just six months out from the all-important Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, here are some benchmarks showing the dual Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance on a Supermicro X13DEM platform while comparing Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 23.04, and the brand new Ubuntu 23.10.

While Friday's release of ROCm 5.7.1 hadn't mentioned any Radeon family GPU support besides the aging Radeon VII, it turns out AMD's newest open-source GPU compute stack is ready to go now with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and is complete with working PyTorch support...

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.4 today as the open-source BSD operating system project's 55th release...

A set of patches to the community-developed MSI-EC Linux kernel driver would allow toggling MSI's Cooler Boost functionality under Linux for enhancing laptop cooling performance...

Intel engineers are proposing that full support for the SYCL programming model be added to upstream LLVM. This is part of their broader oneAPI effort and embracing Khronos' SYCL standard for single-source C++ heterogeneous programming from CPUs to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators...

Intel continues to do a splendid job at ensuring the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang upstream compilers have support for their new processor cores well in advance of products shipping. Beyond already having Sierra Forest, Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake support already in upstream GCC, today one of the Intel compiler engineers sent out patches for enabling the Clear Water Forest and Panther Lake cores...

The USB I2C / SPI / GPIO drivers for Intel's La Jolla Cove Adapter (LCJA) are set to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel merge window opening at the end of the month...

Released on Sunday was uutils 0.0.22 as the open-source software aiming to be a drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils while being written in the Rust programming language for memory safety, better performance, and a modernized codebase...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.6-rc6 and expressed his intention of releasing Linux 6.6 stable in two weeks unless anything wild happens as we approach the end of this kernel cycle...

Queued up this week as part of the HID subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel test release has been a rather embarrassing bug: unplugging Logitech USB receivers has for the past several months been causing the Linux kernel to crash. After a number of bug reports around this issue from unplugging Logitech keyboard/mice receivers to simply switching away on a USB switch with the device(s) attached, the Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel is carrying the fix and it's also marked for back-porting to existing stable Linux kernel series...

Over the past two weeks there has been a pleasant uptick in new commits to Coreboot as part of enabling EPYC 9004 "Genoa" series platform support...

Next week in DRM-Next will hopefully see the patch promoting Intel Meteor Lake graphics to stable in time for the upcoming Linux 6.7 merge window. Ahead of that an i915 drm-intel-next pull request on Friday sent out more Meteor Lake patches while concurrently working on more driver enablement code for Lunar Lake...

While Python 3.12 was just released earlier this month, already the first alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for early-stage testing and evaluation...

On Friday AMD sent in another batch of feature patches that are ready for DRM-Next to in turn be upstreamed with the quickly approaching Linux 6.7 merge window. Most notable with this latest round of feature patches is enabling more next-generation graphics processor IP...

Released on Friday was Wine 8.18 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Now available is Wine-Staging 8.18 as the more experimental blend of Wine that integrates just shy of 500 extra patches atop Wine...

Merged to Mesa 23.3 this weekend is initial support in the V3D Gallium3D (OpenGL) and V3DV Vulkan drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore 7.1.x graphics IP that is found within the new Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer...

Similar to the Radeon RADV driver recently implementing software-based decoding for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has also now wired up ASTC LDR emulation...

AMD on Friday released ROCm 5.7.1 as their latest tagged release to this open-source GPU compute stack that continues progressing to better take on NVIDIA CUDA and Intel oneAPI...

Merged for this quarter's Mesa 23.3 release is the ability to have the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver running atop Zink, the Gallium3D driver known for OpenGL-on-Vulkan. With Rusticl on Zink this now means getting this OpenCL 3.0 driver working atop Vulkan hardware drivers...

The release candidate is out this weekend for FreeBSD 14.0 as the developers work toward releasing FreeBSD 14 stable in early November...

It was another exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 space with a number of notable new features being merged...

The PXN V900 gaming racing wheel is supported now by the mainline Linux kernel as of last night with the latest merged changes for the v6.6 kernel...

Wine 8.18 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source program for running Windows applications and games on Linux. Wine 8.18 is another step closer to Wine 9.0 stable that is due out in early 2024...

OpenZFS 2.2 was promoted to stable today as the latest major update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.2 comes many exciting new features, performance improvements, and other enhancements for this evolution of open-source ZFS...

While the Linux kernel tends to keep around drivers for even very old hardware, once there are no known users left that would still be updating to new Linux kernel versions or the drivers pose a significant maintenance burden, it's eventually time to let them go. We've seen the WiMAX wireless code removed and now the latest on the Linux wireless networking side inching close to the chopping block are old WiFi drivers...

For those using the stock kernel and Mesa drivers when running Ubuntu Linux, the upgrade from Ubuntu 23.04 to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 can mean some nice graphics performance improvements for Intel Arc Graphics users. Here is a look at some Arc Graphics A770 benchmarks on Ubuntu 23.04 to 23.10 plus the gains that are coming up when moving to Linux 6.6 and Mesa 23.3-devel.

The newest Blender alpha builds of the past week have enabled Vulkan API support as an experimental option on Windows and Linux...

OpenWrt 23.05 has been released as the newest feature release for this embedded Linux distribution that is popular for use on networking devices...

AMD has published the Advanced Media Acceleration (AMA) v1.0 SDK as a software stack aimed for hardware video acceleration and capable of high density real-time transcoding. The AMD AMA SDK integrates with the likes of the open-source FFmpeg and GStreamer projects for fitting nicely in the Linux software ecosystem as well as sporting its own C-based API...

Following last week's PipeWire 1.0 release candidate, today a second release candidate was published as part of the project's plan for reaching v1.0 before the end of the year for this widely-used Linux audio/video streams server that is a viable replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

While some Linux distributions like Fedora and Arch are enabling the native Wayland back-end for Firefox by default, upstream Firefox continues to not enable this Wayland support as part of their default builds. But -- at long last -- that might finally change soon...

Following this week's release of Qt 6.6, the Qt Creator 12 beta has been released for this Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment (IDE)...

OpenSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 is now available as the latest community version of SUSE Linux's Enterprise Micro. openSUSE Leap Micro 5.5 is a great choice for a lightweight Linux OS particularly for VMs and containers...

Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech...

It was a busy day for the GCC 14 (GNU Compiler Collection) development with Intel landing three separate noteworthy contributions just today for this next major open-source compiler release...

In addition to Linux 6.6 delivering better results on AMD EPYC servers, Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids is also picking up some performance wins on this forthcoming version of the Linux kernel. Here are some comparison benchmarks looking at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 2S performance between Linux 6.5 stable and the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel.

Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" is now officially available for download as the latest (non-LTS) Ubuntu Linux release with a wealth of updated packages, continued desktop installer improvements, and other refinements ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle...

For those making use of GPU-accelerated AV1 video encoding with the latest AMD Radeon graphics hardware on Linux, the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release will support the high-quality AV1 preset for offering higher quality encodes...

With today's release of Ubuntu 23.10 not only is the performance improved nicely for modern AMD Ryzen systems, but as usual the open-source graphics performance has enjoyed some nice performance improvements, new Vulkan extensions, and more particularly when it comes to the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics drivers...

Roman Gilg who is known for his work on the KWinFT compositor project has spent the past few years quietly developing FDBuild as a new tool for developers to easily pull, configure, and build multiple software projects via a single command. This week he released FDBuild 0.1 as the first public release of this handy utility...

While one month ago a Linux kernel patch was floated for advertising Meteor Lake graphics support by default to effectively mark it as stable and remove it from behind the "i915.force_probe" block, that has yet to be queued for the mainline kernel. Today another set of patches were submitted of new Intel kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.7 with this patch still missing -- but it might squeeze in next week to still make it for the v6.7 cycle...

Released back in May was Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise 2.0 that brought GPU support via SYCL for this denoising library intended for use with ray-tracing applications. Following that big release as part of the broader effort to make Intel's oneAPI suite more supportive on GPUs/accelerators, OIDn 2.1 released on Wednesday with fixes and performance improvements to the GPU support...

System76 has announced their latest design improvements to their in-house manufactured, Linux-loaded Thelio desktop computers...

Intel has enabled a fast clear optimization "FCV" for their Gen12.5 graphics and newer under Linux with the open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver. This can help games like F1 22 with improving performance as much as 45%...

Intel submitted a new i915 DRM Linux kernel driver patch for adding four additional device PCI IDs for DG2/Alchemist graphics processors...

For going along with the recently announced Raspberry Pi 5 speedy single board computer, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is now available that has re-based against Debian 12 "Bookworm"...

Merged today to Linux 6.6 Git is a new patch for fixing an AMD erratum CPU bug affecting Zen 4 based processors like the Ryzen 7000 series and EPYC 8004/9004 series...

Red Hat continues hiring for additional help on their open-source Linux graphics driver team that does stellar work for enabling open-source graphics hardware support in cases like NVIDIA hardware with Nouveau, optimizing performance of existing drivers, and making other infrastructure improvements...

In addition to the recent PreSonus Studio One 6.5 debut for Linux, the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation software this week released its big "8.0" milestone...

Following the news from a few days ago that Curl was prepping for its worst security flaw in a long time affecting the project, Curl 8.4 is now available and with new light on this issue...