Phoronix

One year in the making, NVIDIA's code for explicit GPU synchronization in XWayland along with the X.Org Server DRI3 and Present extensions has now been merged! This is a big culmination of all the recent work around Wayland explicit synchronization and notably takes care of a number of NVIDIA driver problems on Wayland in the process...

Linux Mint is working on providing "ultra fast" repositories for users obtaining system updates and installing new packages on this popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu...

Complementing Canonical's existing Ubuntu Pro subscription service for expanded security maintenance, live kernel patching, compliance and hardening, real-time kernel flavor support, and other enterprise/support add-ons, Canonical today announced Ubuntu Pro For Devices...

An earlier fix to the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver with the new GPU System Processor (GSP) code path had fixed RTX 20 "Turing" GPU support but inadvertently broke the RTX 30 "Ampere" support. David Airlie sent out an urgent new fix today for addressing that regression in the NVIDIA GSP display code...

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Bavaria for today introducing their Versal Series Gen 2 SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. Today's embargo lift covers the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 and Versal Prime Series Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs...

Following the plans going back to 2022 for Fedora 39 to use DNF5 but last summer deemed weren't ready and then delayed DNF5 to Fedora 41 due to the RHEL10 branching from Fedora 40, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now given their sign-off for the updated package manager in F41...

For those making use of AES-XTS crypto for the likes of disk and file encryption on x86_64 CPUs, the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle is bringing some very tantalizing improvements especially if you are running recent AMD and Intel processors. With AMD Zen 4 processors the benefits can be as much as 155% faster while even Intel Ice Lake and Sapphire Rapids server processors can enjoy 127~151% faster AES-XTS-256...

With a few weeks having passed since the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop release along with some point releases for addressing initial fall-out, I've been meaning to run some Plasma 6.0 Linux gaming performance benchmarks. I'll have up some interesting metrics soon using Fedora 40 while for this initial article is a look at the KDE Plasma 6.0 gaming performance between the Wayland and X11 sessions atop KDE Neon. Then similarly are the results for GNOME Shell with its X11 and Wayland sessions.

Engineers at the KDAB consulting firm have begun experimenting with embedding the Rust-written Servo web engine inside Qt software using CXX-Qt...

Following the launch last week of the AMD Ryzen Embedded 8000 Series, SolidRun today announced the Bedrock R8000 as the first industrial PCs designed around these new Ryzen Embedded 8000 series SoCs...

With the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle, the RISC-V architecture code is seeing kernel-mode FPU. This kernel floating point support is needed for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and particular its DCN display code. In turn this should allow recent AMD Radeon graphics cards to work on RISC-V with display support using the company's open-source driver stack...

It's been a long journey but Valve's Samuel Pitoiset has now enabled VK_EXT_shader_object support by default with Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release...

DTrace used to be one of the Solaris features long sought after by Linux developers but over time the Linux kernel tracing capabilities have improved and Oracle has been supporting DTrace on Linux now for years without too much fanfare. DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 was released this past week as the latest iteration of this user-space implementation that builds off the Linux kernel tracing functionality like BPF...

For those running the official Raspberry Pi OS on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series single board computers, the Mesa V3DV Vulkan driver is now shipping by default to provide for a better out-of-the-box experience...

Linux 6.9-rc3 is released and most notable are the Bcachefs fixes to which Torvalds quipped, "if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap." Plus various other fixes throughout...

Similar to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Fedora 39, and other recent Linux distributions increasing its vm.max_map_count default in order to satisfy some Windows games running under Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other memory-intensive software, Arch Linux is also increasing its default value...

While recently there has been more Linux distribution vendor interest in evaluating x86-64-v2 and/or x86-64-v3 baselines for future Linux distribution releases as well as offering optimized packages for higher x86-64 baselines either for x86-64-v3 with being able to assume AVX/AVX2 or in the x86-64-v4 level where AVX-512 is introduced, the prospect of x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels for future processors isn't clear...

Framework Computer as the company behind the popular Framework 13 and Framework 16 upgradeable/modular laptops is hiring for an open-source firmware developer...

For confidential computing "CoCo" virtual machines where the VM host is assumed to be un-trusted and aims to be as isolated as possible, RdRand hardware random number generator instructions are one of the limited sources of entropy for guest VMs. Right now RdRand can fail and the CoCo guest VMs will continue to boot albeit with limited or no entropy to see the VM's random number generation. But being merged today as part of x86 fixes for Linux 6.9 is now requiring seeding RNG with RdRand for CoCo environments otherwise a kernel panic...

One of the latest areas being worked on for enabling Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel is for CPU frequency "CPUFreq" scaling drivers...