Phoronix

For modern Intel platforms supporting Coreboot whether it be for Chromebooks or on server platforms, they are still beholden to the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) binary blobs. But Google and Intel engineers have been working to enable more flexibility around the FSP binaries by being able to optionally reduce the amount of proprietary firmware executed on the CPU, optionally weeding out some of the optional FSP components, and optimizing the status quo to achieve greater boot speeds...

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors...

While last week brought the Plasma 5.27 release as the last feature update to the Plasma 5 series, KDE developers haven't letup in their development efforts with this week continuing to be quite busy for the developers from bug fixing to new features...

Along with all of the Arm SoC and board updates that were merged to the mainline Linux 6.3 kernel earlier in the week, the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have also landed for this next Linux kernel version...

The MFD subsystem changes were merged this week for the Linux 6.3 kernel that include a new driver for the Intel Platform Management Component Interface (PMCI) for use by the BMC controllers on the Intel Max 10 series FPGAs...

As written about last year, the Laminar Research developers responsible for the incredible X-Plane flight simulator software have been working to make use of Mesa's Zink for leveraging OpenGL atop Vulkan to thereby avoid vednor OpenGL drivers that can vary in quality across platforms. With X-Plane 12.04b3, that goal is finally realized...

Introduced to the mainline kernel two years ago with Linux 5.12 was the IDMAPPED mounts functionality that is useful from systemd-homed to containers and other use-cases. Since then more Linux file-systems and software has added support for IDMAPPED mounts and it's being furthered along now with Linux 6.3...

The merge request for landing the first of "many" parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland...

It's not too often I get to talk about major FreeBSD graphics driver improvements, but with the latest X.Org Server Git code paired with the recent NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver there is now support for PRIME render offload should you be using a multi-GPU setup on this BSD...

Adding to all of the other AMD changes coming with Linux 6.3 is now also having the AMD-Xilinx XDMA driver in tow. Getting this XDMA subsystem driver upstreamed is important for unblocking more Xilinx-based feature code to be merged into the Linux kernel...

Back in 2020 Google and the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) came up with a "Criticality Score" to rank the importance/criticality of open-source projects. The Criticality Score is a means of quantifying the importance of an open-source project such as if in need of funding or development assistance. Criticality Score 2.0 has now been published...

The 8BitDo Pro 2 Wired Controller as a popular ~$35 USD gaming controller will see proper support with the Linux 6.3 kernel...

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner has been public now for about two years. CBL-Mariner has been in use for Microsoft's use-cases from their Azure cloud to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) while their newest release continues a recent trend of pointing towards a high performance computing (HPC) workloads focus too...

Merged on Thursday to Mesa 23.1 was implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles using hashed stages with support for caching and replay. What makes this work notable is that it in turn allows the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 running with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton on Linux to begin enjoying ray-tracing support...

The Linux 6.3 scheduler changes were merged earlier this week that overall provide a collection of minor improvements to this important area of the kernel...

For many years now there has been delta RPM support built into Fedora to allow just downloading the binary difference between the currently installed RPM package and the updated version. While this made sense during the days of limited Internet connectivity/bandwidth, delta RPMs haven't proven useful in years and now Fedora Linux is considering removing this support...

Yet another Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver optimization has landed in Mesa 23.1 ahead of its official release next quarter...

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week into the Linux 6.3 kernel and include the initial Intel TPMI integration along with several other driver changes...

Following a small delay, Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS has been released as the latest point release for this current Long Term Support series for Ubuntu Linux...

While the Blender open-source 3D modeling software decided three years ago that they would aim for quarterly releases and so delivering four releases per year, they have now decided to shift to delivering just three releases per year...