Phoronix

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance...

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase...

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support...

It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops...

An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle...

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks...

The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum...

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake...

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates...

LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office...

Clément Lefèbvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware...

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API...

Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference...

The second release candidate of XWayland 23.2 is now available that restores an earlier performance optimization around depth 24 windows...

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time...

Just days after the FreeCAD 0.21-rc release, FreeCAD 0.21 is now available for this popular open-source CAD software...

After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities...

Intel has published their latest quarterly update to the Intel Media Driver open-source VA-API implementation as well as to their oneVPL video processing layer library...