Phoronix

In working toward the stable release of Plasma 6.0 at the end of February, today marks the release candidate of Plasma 6.0 along with the updated Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0 that comprise the "KDE 6th Megarelease" software...

Linux 4.14 debuted at the end of 2017 with exciting features at the time like AMD Vega improvements, working on the since-failed Intel Cannonlake graphics, Zstd compression support, and more. The kernel has advanced a heck of a lot since then and Linux 6.7 recently debuted. It's now time that Linux 4.14 LTS has been declared end-of-life...

A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code...

The tooling changes around the perf subsystem have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window and provide some new hardware features and other new perf profiling capabilities...

Intel engineers have released their FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q4 release, the quarterly set of updates to the FFmpeg multimedia library that they are still working to get upstreamed where appropriate but for now is a convenient home to all of their interesting FFmpeg patches from improved video acceleration for Intel graphics hardware to neural network features still being developed and other patches that aren't yet ready for inclusion into upstream FFmpeg...

Along with the Linux 6.8 power management updates, maintainer Rafael Wysocki at Intel also sent in the ACPI updates for this next kernel version. While the ACPI changes for the kernel are often just routine churn, this cycle it's bringing a new feature: device enumeration for CSI-2 and MIPI DisCo for Imaging support. This will allow MIPI cameras moving forward to be enumerated via the platform firmware on ACPI-based systems...

Coming out of Saarland University is Vcc, the Vulkan Clang Compiler. Vcc provides an "honest attempt to bring the entire C/C++ language family to Vulkan" as an interesting new compiler...

The latest notable feature addition for Mesa 24.0 worth mentioning is to NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver for providing increasingly robust Vulkan API support on this alternative to NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver...

Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections...

Arch Linux is finally going the way of Fedora and others in making Dbus-Broker its default D-Bus daemon implementation...

Thanks to Valve's open-source developers, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed experimental support for transfer queues for facilitating SDMA image copies...

System76 has opted to offer new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors in their Thelio Major desktop line-up to provide for greater performance from AI and creator workloads to all common code compilation and other tasks leveraging many CPU cores/threads. The new System76 Thelio Major powered by Zen 4 Threadripper is being shown off this week at CES 2024 in Las Vegas at AMD's booth. A review on the new Thelio Major workstation will also be forthcoming on Phoronix...

AMD makes heavy use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure by their graphics drivers and compute stack while the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has to a lesser extent supported AMD graphics targets too in the context of GPU compute / OpenMP device offloading. That AMD Radeon/Instinct support for GCC has been carried out over the years by Mentor Graphics and other stakeholders. The latest on the AMD GPU expedition for GCC is that the upcoming GCC 14 compiler will finally be supporting AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics hardware...

The HID driver updates for Linux 6.8 include some useful additions primarily for Linux gamers or those otherwise making use of modern game controllers for other input purposes...

Ahead of the planned release at the start of February, the release candidate of LibreOffice 24.2 is now available for this leading free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office predominantly on Linux systems as well as other platforms...

Intel engineer and longtime Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki on Monday sent out all the PM updates for the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel...

Making use of dmidecode is the go-to way of being able to read various DIMM memory information on Linux systems like the model number, speed, and other attributes. But sadly using dmidecode is restricted to root due to needing to access /dev/mem. But it turns out there is another less reported way to receive much the same information...

The Solus 4.5 Linux distribution is out today as a big update to this original distro that is known for its Budgie desktop environment and other innovations over the years. Solus 4.5 brings some pretty big changes this time around and a nice step forward over Solus 4.4 from a half-year ago...

Following various leaks / rumors / teases in recent days, MSI today formally unveiled the Claw A1M as their first handheld gaming device and the first handheld gaming console in recent time to use an Intel SoC...

Following last month's Meteor Lake announcement, Intel is using CES 2024 this week in Las Vegas for announcing their complete line-up of new Intel Core mobile CPUs as well as completing the line-up of Core 14th Gen desktop processors at 35 and 65 Watt TDPs.

For the execve() system call to execute a program by pathname, the Linux 6.8 kernel is set to land a new optimization to "dramatically" speed-up PATH searches...

The Intel engineers enabling next-generation Arrow Lake processors for Linux have largely been just adding new device IDs and other mostly minor changes over current Meteor Lake processors. It was that way too for Arrow Lake's integrated graphics with largely re-using existing Meteor Lake graphics support, but now it's come to light that select Arrow Lake SKUs will feature updated graphics IP...

The x86 CPU pull request is ready for the Linux 6.8 kernel and besides adding new AMD Zen feature flags easily isolating different CPU generations, there is also an AMD CPU optimization to avoid an unnecessary MFENCE+LFENCE barrier...

AMD used CES 2024 to announce their new Ryzen 8000G series desktop processors and even introducing some new Ryzen 5000 series SKUs. Here are the key details from today's AMD Ryzen announcements while awaiting hardware for Linux testing.

In addition to announcing the Ryzen 8000G series and new Ryzen 5000 series processors, AMD kicked off CES 2024 in Las Vegas by announcing the Radeon RX 7600 XT as their newest RDNA3 discrete graphics card for gamers.

Ingo Molnar sent in all of the scheduler changes this morning for the now-open Linux 6.8 merge window...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates for Linux 6.8 have been submitted for dealing with ECC reporting under Linux and the other error detection/recovery driver updates...

There's been much work recently on a new unified renderer for the GTK toolkit. Yesterday a merge request was opened and already merged that enables Vulkan by default...

While much of the focus by graphics vendors these days is on their Vulkan driver support/performance and less so about OpenGL in 2024, AMD's open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Linux systems is still showing no signs of slowing down and still scoring more performance victories...

Rust For Linux maintainer Miguel Ojeda was among those submitting early pull requests of code feature changes for the now-open Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Following Linus Torvalds' release of the Linux 6.7 kernel last night, the FSFLA folks have released GNU Linux-libre 6.7-gnu as their downstream that strips out non-free microcode/firmware blob support and removes other bits that are not deemed in the interest of free software...

As anticipated Linus Torvalds went ahead and just released the Linux 6.7 kernel as the first new version of 2024...

In recent days there have been leaks about an MSI "CLAW" gaming handheld device set to be announced this coming week at CES in Las Vegas. Making this gaming handheld device interesting is that unlike the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally or Legion Go, it's expected to be the first handheld featuring an Intel Meteor Lake SoC. In particular, the recently launched Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. For those curious about what the performance is likely to roughly be in comparison to the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance of these competing SoCs.

Linux 6.7 should be released later today as the first stable kernel of 2024. In turn the Linux 6.8 merge window will then open tomorrow and run for the next two weeks. For those curious about the features expected for Linux 6.8, here's an early look at some of the changes expected to land for that next kernel cycle...

Debuting in late 2022 was memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used open-source RAM tester. Coming out today is memtest86+ 7.0 as the latest major update to this leading PC memory testing solution...

OpenBLAS 0.3.26 was released this week as the newest feature update to this open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library...

The Linux 6.7 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today following the one week delay due to the end-of-year holidays. Here's a reminder about some of the best features in Linux 6.7...

Landing in Mesa 24.0-devel this week alongside other exciting changes is some pending work for enhancing VKD3D-Proton and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) support for the RADV Vulkan driver...

In preparing for the GNOME 46 Alpha release, this morning the "46.alpha" builds of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published...

After the merge request was open since August of 2022, merged today is support within the GNOME Remote Desktop code for handling graphical remote log-ins...

A few months back AMD announced the MicroBlaze V processor as a soft-core RISC-V processor for embedded system use. With Linux 6.8 the necessary DeviceTree support is landing for the AMD MicroBlaze V...

OpenJPH as the open-source library implementing JPEG2000 Part-15 (JPH / HTJ2K) support is out with a big feature release...

One of the limitations of Google Chrome's Wayland support has been the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) not being supported for GPU-based video acceleration as it's directly targeted the libva-x11 library. But with code merged on Friday to Chromium, libva-drm is now used to allow for working VA-API acceleration on X11 or Wayland...

For the GNOME desktop among the technologies that will hopefully mature into good shape this year are high dynamic range (HDR) display support as well as variable refresh rate (VRR). When it comes to the VRR support there's been more Mutter progress made in this effort...

After no release candidate of Wine 9.0 was published last week due to the end-of-year holidays, Wine 9.0-rc4 is out as the newest test candidate for this forthcoming stable version to enjoy Windows games and applications on Linux...

In the land of odd hardware bugs and interesting Linux kernel behavior, a fix was merged today for Linux 6.7 and to be back-ported to existing stable kernel series for dealing with a situation where unexpected system reboots could happen primarily on AMD Ryzen systems when using Firewire (IEEE-1394)...

A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games...

It looks like 2024 could bring improved support for the Snap app sandboxing/packaging format across Linux distributions to better the overall experience of this Flatpak alternative outside the confines of Ubuntu...

With Intel's 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors that were released last month, in addition to the power efficiency improvements, faster DDR5 memory support, and other enhancements, one of the other notable enhancements talked up by Intel was improved AVX-512 support. Here are some benchmarks using the flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ looking at the performance and thermal/clock/power metrics when toggling AVX-512 support.

As part of the VFS changes submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window, a new "BLK_DEV_WRITE_MOUNTED" Kconfig option is added that allows controlling whether writes are allowed to mounted block devices...