Wine 9.9 Brings ARM Improvements, Drops Obsolete WineD3D Features
Wine 9.9 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Adds Support For Posted Interrupts On Bare Metal Hardware
Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.10 To See More Polishing, NVIDIA Wayland By Default & New Welcome Wizard
Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month’s Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience… ⌘ Read more

Intel’s OpenVINO Now Available In openSUSE
OpenSUSE is the first major Linux distribution to package up and offer Intel’s OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit within its package repository… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Improves Performance For Opening Unencrypted Files
FSCRYPT is the file-system encryption framework within the Linux kernel for supporting optional encryption on file-systems like EXT4, F2FS, Btrfs, and others. With Linux 6.10 an optimization is coming for enhancing the performance of opening files on file-systems supporting FSCRYPT-based encryption but when the files are unencrypted… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Wires Up More Compute Express Link “CXL” Functionality
The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem development continues to be led by Intel engineers and with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel there are yet more features in tow… ⌘ Read more

Intel Readies Xeon Phi Removal For GCC 15
For the GCC 14 compiler release is the deprecation of the Xeon Phi targets. With Intel Knights Landing and Knights Mill being end-of-life at Intel, they are working to do away with the GNU Compiler Collection support. A patch has been posted to drop the Xeon Phi ISAs with GCC 15… ⌘ Read more

EROFS Adds Zstd & Btrfs Gets Minor Performance Work In Linux 6.10
The EROFS and Btrfs file-systems saw their feature patches merged as part of the ongoing Linux 6.10 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Sysctl Sentinel Bloat Removal Wrapping Up In Linux 6.10
The year-long effort to removal the sysctl sentinel for clearing bloat from the kernel and allowing faster build times should be crossing the finish line in Linux 6.10… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 47 Aims For Release On 18 September
The GNOME project has now solidified their release schedule for the current GNOME 47 development cycle: GNOME 47.0 should be out on 18 September… ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen 5 8400F vs. Intel Core i5 14400F: 230+ Benchmarks For Sub-$200 CPU Performance
This week AMD announced the Ryzen 5 8400F and Ryzen 7 8700F processors as new Zen 4 budget CPU contenders lacking any integrated graphics. While part of the Ryzen 8000 series, the 8400F also lacks the Ryzen AI support found in the higher-end SKUs. The Ryzen 5 8400F offers 6 cores / 12 threads, a 4.2GHz base clock and 4.7GHz boost clock, and a 65 Watt TDP while retailing for $169~189 USD. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen 5 8400F vs. Intel Core i5 1440F: 230+ Benchmarks For Sub-$200 CPU Performance
This week AMD announced the Ryzen 5 8400F and Ryzen 7 8700F processors as new Zen 4 budget CPU contenders lacking any integrated graphics. While part of the Ryzen 8000 series, the 8400F also lacks the Ryzen AI support found in the higher-end SKUs. The Ryzen 5 8400F offers 6 cores / 12 threads, a 4.2GHz base clock and 4.7GHz boost clock, and a 65 Watt TDP while retailing for $169~189 USD. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen 5 8400F vs. Intel Core i5 1440F: 230+ Benchmarks For Sub-$200 CPU Performance
This week AMD announced the Ryzen 5 8400F and Ryzen 7 8700F processors as new Zen 4 budget CPU contenders lacking any integrated graphics. While part of the Ryzen 8000 series, the 8400F also lacks the Ryzen AI support found in the higher-end SKUs. The Ryzen 5 8400F offers 6 cores / 12 threads, a 4.2GHz base clock and 4.7GHz boost clock, and a 65 Watt TDP while retailing for $169~189 USD. Here are some initial benchmarks of the AMD … ⌘ Read more

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
Following Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patch Posted For NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP)
A patch has been posted by Samsung engineers for implementing Flexible Data Placement (FDP) support within the Linux kernel’s NVMe driver code. NVMe FDP allows for the host system to have more control over the placement of logical blocks on the storage device… ⌘ Read more

AMD & Supermicro Collaborating On Open-Source Firmware With The OSFF
As more positive indications around AMD’s OpenSIL effort for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA, both AMD and Supermicro are now collaborating with the Open-Source Firmware Foundation. Supermicro has also publicly shown off a platform with OpenSIL+Coreboot and is said to be exploring OpenBMC for future hardware… ⌘ Read more

Ampere Computing 2024 Roadmap Update: 256 Core 3nm CPU In 2025
Ampere Computing today made public their roadmap update concerning current and future AArch64 server processors. AmpereOne availability remains tough but the company is hoping next year to introduce a 3nm CPU with up to 256 cores and supporting 12 channel DDR5 memory. ⌘ Read more

PipeWire 1.2 Preps For Async Processing, Snap Support & Explicit Sync
Following last year’s release of PipeWire 1.0 for managing audio and video streams on the Linux desktop and proving itself a capable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, among other uses, PipeWire 1.2 is nearing release. Out today is the first release candidate of the upcoming PipeWire 1.2… ⌘ Read more

Intel Habana Labs & Xe Linux Driver Maintainer Steps Down
Coming as a surprise, longtime Linux developer Oded Gabbay announced he’s left Intel / Habana Labs and is therefore stepping down from the maintainer role of the Linux kernel drivers for the Intel Xe DRM driver and more notably the Habana Labs accelerator driver that he’s maintained from the start… ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 “GFX12”
The open-source Mesa driver developers employed by Valve for working on the Linux graphics stack have begun preparing the RADV Vulkan driver and the ACO compiler back-end for the upcoming “GFX12” graphics IP for next-generation RDNA4… ⌘ Read more

Intel IPU6 Driver Being Upstreamed In Linux 6.10
Intel’s Image Processing Unit (IPU) IP has been a cause for concern in recent years as the lack of proper upstream open-source driver support has led Linux users running into troubles making use of MIPI camera sensors on modern laptops. Finally with Linux 6.10 the Intel IPU6 driver is being upstreamed into the media subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds On Dogfooding The Linux Kernel
Besides Linus Torvalds examining various elements of code he’s merging and build testing it on his AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation and now also testing more on ARM64 with Ampere Altra, he does these days still believe in “dogfooding” and is in fact running the leading-edge Linux kernel code even during the merge window… ⌘ Read more

Firewire IEEE-1394 Support Continues To Be Improved With The Linux 6.10 Kernel
While most of you have not thought about or used Firewire (IEEE-1394) in years, there still are some legacy digital video cameras and some professional audio devices relying on the interface. Last year saw a new Firewire maintainer step-up for the Linux kernel after the code had fallen dormant. The plans by that new maintainer, Takashi Sakamoto, are to maintain Linux’s Firewire support through 2029. He’s continuing to do a good job with the … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.1-rc4 Backports NVK DRM Format Modifiers Support
The Mesa 24.1 stable release is nearing while out today is the fourth weekly release candidate. While the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver changes typically dominate new Mesa releases, Mesa 24.1-rc4 is headlined by a big change for the NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver… ⌘ Read more

Intel TDX For Confidential VMs Causing Concern Among Fedora & Open-Source Advocates
One of the capabilities of newer Intel Xeon Scalable processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) as a way of providing for confidential virtual machines. Intel TDX allows for “isolation, confidentiality, and integrity at the VM level” which is good from the security perspective but the dependence on signed binaries is causing mixed feelings within the Fedora camp at the broader open-source community… ⌘ Read more

The NTSYNC Driver For Wine/Proton Is “Broken” For Linux 6.10
While Linux 6.10 is poised to merge the initial NTSYNC driver for a Windows NT Synchronization Primitive driver that can help with faster Windows gaming performance under Wine/Proton (Steam Play), the driver isn’t complete. The initial patches have been in Greg Kroah-Hartman’s char-misc-next branch for several weeks to expose the NTSYNC character device, it isn’t the entire patch series. Greg has now marked the driver as “broken” for Linux 6.10… ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA Has Been Seeing New Activity For CUDA On AMD GPUs
Back in February I wrote about AMD having quietly funded the effort for a drop-in CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs built atop the ROCm library. This was an incarnation of ZLUDA that originally began as a CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs using oneAPI Level Zero. While AMD discontinued funding ZLUDA development earlier this year, this CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs is continuing to see some new code activity… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Networking Adds New Intel Hardware Support, More WiFi 7 Enablement
The networking subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel. As usual it’s a big update with some 90,083 new lines of code and 37,889 lines removed… ⌘ Read more

AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 Driver Adds Phoenix 2 APU Support
It’s been the better part of two months since the last AMDVLK driver update while today the AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver has been christened… ⌘ Read more

Arm Mali/Immortalis GPU Driver, New AMD Graphics IP & Lunar Lake Display In Linux 6.10
The big batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates for the Linux 6.10 merge window were sent out today that includes the new “Panthor” driver for newer ARM Mali/Immortalis graphics processors and the usual hearty assortment of Intel and AMD graphics driver changes… ⌘ Read more

Mir 2.17 Better Supports Hybrid Graphics & Other Wayland Enhancements
https://github.com/canonical/mirCanonical engineer Matthew Kosarek just released Mir 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Wayland compositor that can be used for building Wayland-based shells and has shown some interesting potential with the likes of Miracle-WM and Miriway… ⌘ Read more

Sound Support For Intel Battlemage In Linux 6.10
Along with the various Intel Xe2 driver changes that are ongoing for the Intel Linux graphics driver stack, over in the sound subsystem the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is bringing HDMI audio support for upcoming Intel Battlemage graphics cards… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Is Doing More ARM64 Linux Testing Now That He Has A More Powerful System
Linux kernel and Git creator Linus Torvalds is known for his current use of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation as his main system after years of using Intel hardware. The past few years he’s also been doing more ARM64 testing now that he has an Apple MacBook using Apple Silicon that serves as a nice travel device and for routinely compiling new ARM64 Linux kernel builds. More recently, his ARM64 Linux testing has incr … ⌘ Read more

systemd 256-rc2 Released With A Few More Features
The first release candidate of systemd 256 came just under one month ago with new features like run0 as the new sudo alternative, a new “systemd-vpick” binary, importctl as another new tool, Zboot kernel support with systemd ukify, systemd-homed improvements, and much more. Systemd 256-rc2 is out this evening with a few more features and other fixes collected over the past several weeks… ⌘ Read more

Framework 13 AMD Laptop Seeing Experimental Coreboot Port
The Framework Laptops are some great systems with their upgradeable/modular design, friendly Linux support, both Intel and AMD options, the latest models making use of an open-source embedded controller, and nice build quality. The Framework Laptops have proven very popular with Linux/open-source enthusiasts but one of the recurring critiques has been the lack of Coreboot firmware support for these laptops as an alternative (or outright replacement) t … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases Updated CPU Microcode For Fixing Three New Security Issues
Intel just published a new set of CPU microcode files for updating Alder lake and newer as well as Xeon Scalable 4th Gen and 5th Gen in order to address three security issues plus take care of various functional issues… ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking The First RISC-V Cloud Server: Scaleway EM-RV1 Performance
Scaleway by way of their Scaleway Labs group recently launched the Elastic Metal RV1 (EM-RV1) as the world’s first RISC-V servers available in the cloud. These RISC-V cloud servers are built around the T-Head 1520 SoC and are an interesting way to explore the RISC-V architecture and/or otherwise make use of RISC-V for CI/CD deployments or other testing purposes. In this article are some benchmarks showing the RISC-V EM-RV1 performance against … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Engineer Ports EXT2 File-System Driver To Rust
Back in late 2023 were Rust abstractions for the Linux kernel’s Virtual File-System (VFS) code. Those patches by Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho have now seen a second iteration posted… In addition to various improvements to the Rust VFS bindings, the new patches bring a work-in-progress EXT2 Rust file-system driver… ⌘ Read more

Debian Releases APT 2.9.3 With New Package Solver
Debian’s APT packaging tool is working its way toward the big APT 3.0 release. The APT 2.9 development series is underway and debuting last month was APT’s new (CLI) user interface with a columnar display, colored text, and other improvements for this widely-used tool on Debian-based environments. APT 2.9.3 is out today as the newest development release and new to this version is a new package solver… ⌘ Read more

Steam Deck IMU Support Submitted For Linux 6.10 Plus ASUS ROG Ally HID
The Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates have been submitted for the newly-opened Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Among the HID driver updates coming with Linux 6.10 are supporting the Steam Deck IMU motion sensors as well as HID coverage for the ASUS ROG Ally and ASUS ROG Z13 devices… ⌘ Read more

NVK Vulkan Driver Lands DRM Format Modifiers Support
After the 22 patches were under review for the past eight months, merged today is the NVK Vulkan driver support for the VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier extension for handling DRM format modifiers… ⌘ Read more

Zone Write Plugging Comes To Linux 6.10 For Better Performance
Along with the IO_uring improvements for Linux 6.10, the block subsystem changes have also been merged for this new kernel version… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Talks Up Their Linux Support For The Snapdragon X Elite
While much of the emphasis for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite laptop SoC has been around Windows on Arm PCs, Qualcomm has also been working to have upstream Linux support for this high-end SoC and everything is coming together for said support… ⌘ Read more

Manjaro 24.0 Released: Powered By Linux 6.9 & The Latest Desktops
Manjaro 24.0 has been released today as the newest version of this Arch Linux derived desktop OS. Manjaro 24.0 ships with the latest the newly-released Linux 6.9 kernel and a slew of other updated packages… ⌘ Read more

Rust 1.78 Upgrade For Linux 6.10, Dropping In-Tree “alloc” Fork To Save ~10k Lines
There’s another Rust upgrade coming for the Linux 6.10 kernel to bump the Rust version baseline required for building the Rust in-tree kernel components. This raising of the baseline will continue until a suitable minimum version is achieved where official Rust compiler “just works” well with the Rust’ed kernel bits. The Rust upgrade in Linux 6.10 also does away with its in-tree “alloc” fork for big code savings and simplifying maintena … ⌘ Read more

More ARM-Based Handheld Game Consoles Supported By Linux 6.10
The various ARM SoC/platform pull requests were already merged today by Linus Torvalds for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Makes AES-XTS Disk/File Encryption Much Faster For Modern Intel/AMD CPUs
The work written about one month ago on Phoronix for much faster AES-XTS on modern Intel/AMD CPUs for speeding up disk and file encryption by as much as 155% with AMD Zen 4 CPUs has been submitted for Linux 6.10! As expected, this work providing new AES-XTS implementations for modern x86_64 processors is going into Linux 6.10 as part of the crypto subsystem updates… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 126 Available - Adds “Linux” To The Android User Agent String
Mozilla has pushed out its release images of the Firefox 126 web browser ahead of its official debut on Tuesday… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Makes AES-XTS Disk/File Encryption Much Faster For Modern Intel/AMD CPUs
The work written about one month ago on Phoronix for much faster AES-XTS on modern Intel/AMD CPUs for speeding up disk and file encryption by as much as 155% with AMD Zen 4 CPUs has been submitted for Linux 6.10! As expected, this work providing new AES-XTS implementations for modern x86_64 processors is going into Linux 6.10 as part of the crypto subsystem updates… ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation Launches The High Performance Software Foundation
Back at Supercomputing 23, the Linux Foundation announced their intent on forming the High Performance Software Foundation for helping to advance open-source software for high performance computing (HPC). The Linux Foundation is now using ISC 24 this week in Hamburg, Germany for announcing that the High Performance Software Foundation has launched… ⌘ Read more