Phoronix

Archinstall 2.8.1 is now available for the newest version of this easy-to-use, command-line driven installer for the Arch Linux operating system...

System76 developers are still on track for releasing the alpha version of their Rust-written COSMIC desktop in late July...

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced "Everything LTS" as a new initiative where for Ubuntu Pro customers they will offer up a twelve year LTS period for any open-source Docker image...

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a Rust-based OpenCL driver for GPUs backed by Gallium3D support now works with the Broadcom V3D driver. This V3D support is notable as it's most commonly associated with the Raspberry Pi single board computers...

AMD has published AMDVLK 2024.Q2.3 as the newest version of their open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for the Xe2 next-generation graphics to be found with forthcoming Lunar Lake processors and the Battlemage discrete graphics cards...

NVIDIA has upstreamed a patch to the GCC 15 compiler for adding the "-mcpu=grace" option to make it easier to target NVIDIA Grace AArch64 CPU cores from this open-source compiler...

OpenSUSE has released Leap Micro 6.0 as stable for this community rebranded build of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 6.0. Leap Micro continues to be focused on delivering a very reliable and robust experience for containers and virtual machines...

A change proposal has been approved for Fedora 41 to make OpenSSL distrust SHA1 signatures by default...

Engineers at consulting firm Igalia are exploring NUMA emulation for ARM64 (AArch64) due to the potential of "significant" performance uplift as observed on the popular Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer...

With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor. For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop...

When testing Intel's aggressive software Linux optimizations shipped by way of their in-house Clear Linux distribution, I am most often testing it on their high core count Xeon processors with AVX-512... Over the years in dozens of Phoronix articles there have been countless metrics showing off the out-of-the-box performance benefits from leveraging software built for higher x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels, employing compiler-based function multi-versioning, and the other extensive performance tuning carried out by Intel software engineers. But now with the Intel Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" series now being available for these all-E-core server processors, I was curious about quantifying the Clear Linux benefits over the likes of Ubuntu Linux. Here are those benchmarks for those curious about the difference.

Back in May the Raspberry Pi crew announced Raspberry Pi Access as an easy means of remote GUI access to Raspberry Pi single board computers all from a web browser. Today they've announced the latest improvements to Raspberry Pi Connect...

Earlier this month AMD Fast CPPC support was queued into the Linux power management subsystem's "-next" codebase ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle. Additional AMD P-State driver enhancements are now deemed ready and submitted for staging ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off...

The open-source Intel ANV Vulkan driver has recently been seeing improvements around better handling the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

With Fedora's new web-based installer UI being delayed to 2025 with Fedora 42, part of Red Hat's justification for that setback was needing to invest resources first in Fedora 41 by transitioning the OS installer to being a native Wayland application. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on that work as expected to make the Anaconda OS installer a native Wayland application...

OpenShot 3.2 has been released as the latest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editor that is popular on Linux systems...

Related to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz for significantly improving the Mesa glReadPixels performance by more than 100%, the open-source driver developer at Valve has now enabled compute PBO blits within mainline Mesa for the AMD Radeon "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver...

Llamafile has been one of the better new initiatives out of Mozilla in recent years. Llamafile makes it easy to conveniently distribute and run large language models as a single file while supporting both CPU and GPU execution and all-around making AI LLMs much more approachable for end-users. Out today is Llamafile 0.8.7 with more performance optimizations and new features...

A new set of patches are currently being tested for improving task scheduling and in turn performance for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. With the patch also mentioning systems that are hybrid but without SMT, this looks like it may be some early tuning as well for upcoming Intel Lunar Lake processors that lack Hyper Threading...

With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver...

Just a friendly reminder that if you've been procrastinating in migrating past the once-great CentOS Linux 7, there is less than one week to go now until it's officially end-of-life...

Qualcomm engineers on Sunday posted patches for enabling the Adreno X1-85 GPU within the MSM DRM driver. The Adreno X1-85 GPU is what's found within the Snapdragon X Elite SoC powering various new Windows ARM laptops although the Linux support continues maturing too for these platforms...

Back during the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle support was added for the ASUS ROG Raikiri as a newer gaming controller. Now on its way for landing in Linux 6.10 is support for the ASUS ROG Raikiri Pro...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 6.10-rc5 as the newest weekly test release leading up to the Linux 6.10 stable release by mid-July...

Back in 2019 after various speculation-based CPU vulnerabilities began coming to light, Amazon engineers proposed process-local memory allocations for hiding KVM secrets. They were striving for an alternative mitigation for vulnerabilities like L1TF by essentially providing some memory regions for kernel allocations out of view/access from other kernel code. Amazon engineers this week laid out a new proposal after five years of ongoing Linux kernel improvements for MM-local memory allocations for dealing with current and future speculation-based cross-process attacks...

The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers...

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.27 as the newest feature update to this Rust-written, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils as the common set of utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms...

On Friday more AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes were submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle by way of DRM-Next. We're nearing the end of feature work to DRM-Next before the Linux 6.11 merge window begins in mid-July while this latest AMD pull request continues preparing for upcoming RDNA4 graphics hardware among other changes...

Red Hat engineer Leonardo Bras has laid out a proposal for QPWs, or "Queue PerCPU Work", as a better means of handling per-CPU operations within the Linux kernel especially for real-time (RT) workloads...

Flathub as the centralized repository for serving Flatpak sandboxed Linux applications crossed the threshold this weekend of serving more than two billion downloads...

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel...

Merged on Friday to LLVM 19 Git is a generic MLIR to SPIR-V pass for lowering the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation down into SPIR-V as the intermediate representation consumed by OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan drivers...

GNOME developers continue to be very busy with a variety of initiatives thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) financing as well as other general development efforts as they work their way toward GNOME 47 in September...

Following this week's great KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop release, developers have been fixing some minor bugs and other issues that were raised by early users of this updated open-source Qt6-powered desktop...

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source/Linux graphics driver team has submitted a merge request to "massively" improve the OpenGL glReadPixels performance within the common Mesa state tracker...

While more software piles on AI features these days, today's release of the Darktable 4.8 RAW photography software has removed one of its AI features after realizing it only delivers mediocre quality...

VKD3D-Proton 2.13 is now available as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API translation later that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for accelerating D3D12 Windows games on Linux...

With some Linux users not liking the recently showcased new Linux "Blue Screen of Death" for kernel panics, Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas who has been one of those involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure showed that it can also be a "black screen of death" if so desired...

Earlier this week was a proposal for creating a new Mesa legacy driver branch for clearing out older OpenGL drivers like the ATI R300, AMD R600, Lima, Nouveau NV30, and other older GPU drivers. However, other upstream Mesa developers aren't convinced by the proposal...

Cloud Hypervisor 40.0 is out today for this open-source Rust-written VMM that started off as an Intel software project and evolved into a multi-vendor initiative with backing from the likes of Microsoft, Arm, AMD, and others for a cloud-focused, security-critical virtualization hypervisor...

Intel software engineers have been upstreaming the Lunar Lake support for Linux a number of months already and the basics appear in good shape, aside from the Xe2 graphics enablement being an ongoing matter. Much of the rest of the core functionality has appeared to be in good shape ahead of Lunar Lake laptops launching in Q3, but it seems there have been a few missing power management related bits...

Newly merged patches for Mesa 24.2 slightly enhance the default out-of-the-box build experience for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on POWER/PowerPC platforms...

The Intel Xe driver is working on supporting PMT functionality with a new set of patches that may be mainlined for Linux v6.11~6.12...

While not talked about as much as the likes of the Intel Gaudi accelerators with their upstream Habana Labs kernel driver or the AMD Instinct MI300 series with their open-source upstream support too, back in 2022 Qualcomm did post an open-source kernel driver for their Cloud AI accelerator. That was followed by an open-source compiler and user-space stack and in turn the QAIC driver was upstreamed into the accelerator (accel) subsystem last year with Linux 6.4...

Intel on Wednesday released version 1.5 of their Linux NPU driver, their user-space driver component for Linux systems in enabling the neural processing unit found with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors and newer. This goes along with their upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for allowing a full open-source solution for AI workloads with the likes of OpenVINO...

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support...

In addition to Mutter seeing Wayland DRM lease protocol support merged, another long-in-development patch series hit GNOME Shell this morning: accent color support!..

Merged today into GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol to allow for nice virtual reality (VR) headset support for GNOME on Wayland...

It was just a few months back that Intel introduced a Gaudi "2C" variant of Gaudi2 to their open-source Linux driver. This variant might be for some export model or otherwise a hyperscaler/customer-specific revision or something along those lines. Now appearing within new Habana Labs driver patches for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel are patches for a new Gaudi 2D variant...