Phoronix

Barring any release-blocking issues from coming up in the next week, Mesa 23.0 aims for its official release while 23.0-rc3 is now available for last minute testing...

Systemd developers today released their first release candidate of the upcoming systemd 253 feature release, which introduces a new "ukify" tool and has many other changes for this dominant Linux init system...

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board of Directors has adopted updated by-laws that go into place next month with an aim of further protecting copyleft licensing...

Expected to be squared away in time for the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle, which is kicking off in February, is Automatic IBRS as a new feature of Zen 4 processors. The patches already have been queued up into TIP's x86/cpu branch so barring any issues will be all wired up for this next kernel version. Automatic IBRS can provide better performance than the Retpolines implementation used currently on Zen 4 and prior CPUs as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. With the switch over to Automatic IBRS for Zen 4, it means better performance in some areas as shown by these benchmarks today with AMD 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors.

DXVK 2.1 has just been released as this Direct3D 9/10/11 to Vulkan API translation layer that is most notably used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for helping to run Windows games with great speed on Linux...

The openSUSE project in collaboration with Cisco is making it easier to deploy H.264 codec support on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed...

Wine 8.0 is now officially out as the annual stable feature update for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Sound Open Firmware 2.4.1 is out today as the first stable v2.4 release for this open-source audio / DSP firmware stack for not only modern Intel platforms but AMD, Mediatek, and other increasing industry use as well. With Sound Open Firmware 2.4 they have continued the transition in making use of Zephyr RTOS...

Going back to last August AMD Linux engineers began posting Linux kernel patches for new Quality of Service features coming with Zen 4. After a few rounds of review and updates to those patches, this work enabling the AMD SMBA and BMEC features for 4th Gen EPYC "Genoa" processors appear positioned for introduction in the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle...

MoltenVK is out with a new release for implementing the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for enjoying this industry-standard graphics/compute API on macOS and iOS...

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer has released new versions of the xf86-video-qxl and xf86-video-vmware DDX drivers for those making use of these X.Org drivers in virtualized environments...

GStreamer 1.22 is out today as the first major release of 2023 for this open-source multimedia framework. With GStreamer 1.22 comes some exciting feature additions...

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's, IceWM 3.3.1 was released today as the first (minor) release of 2023...

It's easy to forget that Microsoft maintains a command-line package manager for Windows... The open-source WinGet package manager is approaching three years since its announcement while it continues to not be as rich and robust of what Linux users for many years have enjoyed, but in any case it's continuing to be improved...

There still is another month to go until the Linux 6.2 kernel is released as stable and in turn kicking off the Linux 6.3 merge window. But from my monitoring in recent weeks, here is an early preview of some of the material expected for the v6.3 kernel based on what's been queuing in the various subsystem "-next" branches or otherwise looking like it should align for the next cycle...

With this weekend's release of helloSystem 0.8 as a macOS-inspired open-source desktop OS built atop FreeBSD, I decided to try out this new release on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop to see how it would go.

The Armv8.1-M based Cortex-M85 processor support has made it into the GCC 13 compiler for this highest performing Cortex-M processor use for MCUs and embedded applications...

Fwupd 1.8.10 is out this morning to kickoff a new week and continuing to enhance the open-source firmware updating support on Linux systems...

It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases...

A new feature with Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" that hasn't been talked about too much is the new User Interrupts (UNITR) functionality. The Linux kernel support for it still also hasn't been merged but has shown promising results in patch form...