Phoronix

Niri is an interesting scrollable tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM that has been gaining user interest in recent months. This weekend marked the v0.1.3 release of this Wayland compositor...

All of the Rust feature patches have already been submitted in a pull request to Linus Torvalds ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 merge window...

Last year saw a lot of code clean-up work on the Linux kernel and working to remove support for obsolete hardware no longer being actively maintained within the mainline kernel tree for years. On the CPU side one of the efforts has been to remove unused SPARC 32-bit CPU support for old Sun workstations. The patches for removing unused SPARC32 code was updated this weekend and now undergoing review...

The GNOME 46 release candidate was officially rolled out today as the last chance to test the GNOME 46 desktop software ahead of its stable release later this month...

Linux 6.8 could debut as stable as soon as tomorrow if all goes well... Linus Torvalds last week was unsure whether an extra release candidate would be needed after the quiet 6.8-rc7 release. This week's seen a continued flow of fixes land, so we'll see what Linus decides on Sunday but in any event there are already a number of early 6.9 pull requests...

Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver for open-source NVIDIA support has merged sparse memory support. This is a big milestone as it's needed for running a number of newer games under Linux...

The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary outlining the interesting feature work and bug fixes to land in the KDE space. Being fresh off the recent Plasma 6.0 release, a lot of bug reports are still coming in while developers are already busy tackling new features for Plasma 6.1...

Wine 9.4 is out today as a rather notable bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

While the Linux v6.8 kernel may debut as stable as soon as this weekend, a last-minute pull request of some new AMD graphics IP was submitted today to DRM-Next in aiming to make it for the imminent Linux 6.9 merge window...

Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API...

While Ubuntu 24.04 LTS won't be officially out until the back-half of April, here is an early look at how the Intel Xeon Scable "Emerald Rapids" performance is looking right now compared to Ubuntu 23.10 and the current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series in a variety of benchmarks. As largely expected with the software updates, the new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will help achieve greater server/HPC performance on recent Intel processors.

Announced one month ago by Cyberus Technology was an open-source KVM back-end for VirtualBox. This work by Cyberus allows for using the KVM hypervisor with VirtualBox as opposed to its custom kernel module maintained by Oracle. That KVM back-end has now been extended to support SR-IOV graphics virtualization...

AMD engineers and those debugging s2idle suspend/resume issues for Ryzen laptops under Linux will soon have more information at disposal for newer SoCs supporting MP2 STB functionality...

The optional case-insensitive file/folder handling under Linux that's hooked up for various file-systems like EXT4 and F2FS will benefit from improved performance on the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Sent in today as part of the input subsystem fixes for the current Linux 6.8 kernel cycle are adding support for several more HP HyperX gaming controllers...

Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal...

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs...

While Mesa Gallium3D drivers with capable GPUs have already supported accelerated AV1 video deocding, to date it's been limited to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). With newly-merged code for Mesa 24.1, the VDPAU state tracker can now also handle AV1 decoding with supported drivers/GPUs...