AMD: “Additional Parts Of The Radeon Stack To Be Open Sourced Throughout The Year”
After recently announcing they’d be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend… ⌘ Read more

AMD SEV-SNP Hypervisor Support Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel
AMD’s upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision… ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 Brings Arrow Lake H Support
The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company’s modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc5 Released: The Diffstat “Looks A Bit Wonky” But Not Bad
The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts RDNA3+ Firmware Files For Linux Users
This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / “RDNA3 refresh” / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 46.1 Brings Explicit Sync, Better NVIDIA Hybrid GPU Acceleration
GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series… ⌘ Read more

GNU Portability Library’s Tool Rewritten In Python For 8~100x Better Performance
The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation… ⌘ Read more

EROFS Eyes Zstd Compression, Intel QAT/IAA Accelerator Support, & Experimental Rust Code
The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc5 Picking Up Fixes For Intel FRED, BHI & GFNI/VAES Checks
Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week’s batch of “x86/urgent” fixes were sent out this morning… ⌘ Read more

Niri 0.1.5 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Adds New Animations
Niri as an innovative, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor is out today with its newest feature release… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Working To Make Key Rack A Viable Password Manager, Better Printing For Flatpaks
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines ongoing exciting work to the desktop thanks to the additional funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund plus a variety of other ongoing desktop/app enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Linux BHI Mitigation Being Tweaked Following 12% Database Performance Hit
A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source “Terakan” Vulkan Driver For Radeon HD 6000 Series Shown On Windows
The past year there’s been an independent open-source driver developer working on “Terakan” as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin “Triang3l” has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominant … ⌘ Read more

KDE Developers Work Through More Bug Fixes & Features For Plasma 6.1
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week… ⌘ Read more

Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements
Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries
While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn’t released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.45 Begins Landing Code For SHA1 & SHA256 Interoperability For Repositories
Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories… ⌘ Read more

Godot’s Vulkan Backend Seeing Better Performance, 10~20% Reduction In Frame Times
The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot’s Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users… ⌘ Read more

Miracle-WM 0.2 Released For Mir-Based Wayland Compositor
Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Preps A Kernel Panic Screen - Sort Of A “Blue Screen of Death”
While systemd 255 last year introduced a “blue screen of death” inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it’s not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 Brings Improved OpenCL/OpenGL Sharing
As the first new release to Intel’s open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes… ⌘ Read more

Tow-Boot 2023.07 U-Boot Distribution Released With New Board Support
It’s been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader… ⌘ Read more

Rockchip NPU Open-Source Driver Taking Shape, Will Aim For Upstream Accel Driver
It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he’s shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort… ⌘ Read more

Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 Brings VP9 Fix & AV1 Refinements
Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release Next Week
After not being ready in time for this week’s early release target date, it’s now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written LAVD Kernel Scheduler Shows Promising Results For Linux Gaming
Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel’s scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve’s Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Boosts Performance, Outperforming Windows 11 On The AMD Ryzen Framework 16 Laptop
With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I’ve been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 … ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Factory Achieves Bit-By-Bit Reproducible Builds
While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps Adaptive Sync SDP, Lunar Lake Display & More DG2 PCI IDs In Linux 6.10
On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel’s open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality… ⌘ Read more

Autodafe 0.2 Released For Freeing Your Project From Autotools
Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides “tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools.”.. ⌘ Read more

GTK4 Continues Improving Graphics Offload & DMA-BUF Integration
There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Rocky Linux To Support Upstream Stable Kernels
With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we’re beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just “RHEL clones”. It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that’s been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels… ⌘ Read more

System76’s COSMIC Working On Drag & Drop, More Compositor Improvements
System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year… ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.38 Media Player Released With New Options & Fixes
MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging FFmpeg is out with its newest release… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.35 Introduces Alpha Modifier Protocol, Tablet-V2 As Stable
Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications… ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.0 Released For Qt6 Desktop Port, Greater Wayland Support
LXQt 2.0 is now available for this lightweight desktop environment that has now been ported to the Qt 6.6+ toolkit. Additionally, much of the LXQt components are ready to be used under Wayland compositors… ⌘ Read more

Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver
Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 To Add Script For Building ARM64 Flat Image Trees
Queued as part of the ARM64 patches in the various “-next” branches ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window is a script for being able to build Flat Image Trees (FITs). A Flat Image Tree is the compiled Linux kernel paired with the associated DeviceTree content that is compressed and easily then distributed and executed by capable bootloaders… ⌘ Read more

XWayland 24.1 RC Released With Explicit Sync, Improved Rootful & GLAMOR Optimizations
As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May… ⌘ Read more

ROCm 6.1 Released With Ubuntu 22.04.4 Support, rocDecode For AMD Video Decode
The much anticipated ROCm 6.1 has now been released! ROCm 6.1 is heavy on new features as well as expanding official operating system coverage to include the latest Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS point release… ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation, Intel & Others Launch The Open Platform for Enterprise AI
The Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders like Intel, Red Hat, Hugging Face, MariaDB, Cloudera, and others have launched the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) as a new enterprise AI collaborative effort… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Supports Easy Installation Of OpenZFS Root File-System With Encryption
For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it’s in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there’s also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Supports Easy Installation Of OpenZFS Root File-System With Encryption
For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it’s in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there’s also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system… ⌘ Read more

Valkey Celebrates Its First Stable Release As Open-Source Redis Fork
Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they’ve released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.0.4 Ships With Dozens Of Bug Fixes
It’s been three weeks since the Plasma 6.0.3 point release while today KDE has shipped Plasma 6.0.4 as its April bug-fix release… ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces Ryzen PRO 8840 & PRO 8000G Series CPUs
Following the launch of the Ryzen 8000G series processors earlier this year as well as the Ryzen 8840 series mobile processors, AMD has now announced the associated “PRO” parts for business customers. ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.1 Now Supports Vulkan Explicit Synchronization On X11
At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 24.1 Now Supports Vulkan Explicit Synchronization On X11
At the start of April Mesa 24.1 saw Vulkan explicit sync support for Wayland implemented. Now hitting Mesa 24.1-devel today is Vulkan explicit sync support for X11/X.Org… ⌘ Read more

Native BHI Mitigation Performance Benchmarks On Core i9 14900K Under Linux 6.9
With the new security mitigation for the “Native BHI” Spectre vulnerability affecting even the recent Intel processors, a number of Phoronix readers have been curious about the performance impact of the mitigation. Over the past week I’ve been running some benchmarks on recent Intel CPUs to better look into any performance implications… ⌘ Read more

More Bcachefs Fixes & Recovery Improvements Land In Linux 6.9
The Bcachefs fixes continue to come in on the heavier side for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel… ⌘ Read more