Phoronix

Linux kernel graphics drivers have been growing too much in size that they are taking too long to load at boot time for quickly lighting up the display to present the nice Plymouth boot splash experience. This has led to situations of the Plymouth boot splash screen falling back to its simple text-based interface after timing out. As a workaround, Fedora 42 is looking to use the generic "SimpleDRM" driver during this initial boot splash screen experience to initially avoid the bulky DRM drivers...

Due to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) lead maintainer David Airlie of Red Hat going on holidays the next two weeks, he's preemptively submitted the DRM/accelerator feature pull request ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window officially opening...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team landed some changes on Thursday to the open-source RADV driver within Mesa around GPU checks for the hardware supported by this popular AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems...

At the start of the new year I talked about patches improving AMD Radeon video encode/decode for older GPUs. That work to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's UVD and VCE support has now been merged ahead of the Mesa 25.0 code branching coming up in just over one week...

Back in 2022 the PCI Express 7.0 specification was announced with hitting 128 GT/s and planned availability in 2025. Since then they have been iterating on the spec with PCI-SIG members and today they announced the PCI Express 7.0 v0.7 specification...

With Linus Torvalds expected to release Linux 6.13 stable this coming Sunday, 19 January, here's a reminder about the most exciting features, performance optimizations, and new hardware support arriving for this first major kernel release of 2025...

Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we've been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.

An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance...

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light...

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call...

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors...

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues...

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64...

A change proposal filed today for the in-development Fedora 42 is looking at making use of the EROFS file-system for all of the live media images...

George Hotz' Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a "completely sovereign" software stack for GPU compute on AMD...

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is poised to introduce support for Intel THC... The Touch Host Controller IP block found in the PCH of modern Intel laptops for dealing with touchscreen, touchpads, and similar functionality...

An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital...

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code...

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling...

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests...