Phoronix

Webcameras on newer Intel laptops have been challenging for Linux use without resorting to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space components, but that's been thankfully changing with progress being made on an open-source stack. There's still proprietary firmware necessary for enabling the IPU6 image processing unit, but at least that too is now in linux-firmware.git for easy distribution and packaging by Linux distributions...

Since last August AMD Linux engineers have been working on P-State Preferred Core support for the "amd_pstate" driver so that this functionality can be leveraged under Linux for improved task placement...

January was a busy month with a number of notable hardware launches from the Framework 16 laptop to the new AMD Ryzen 8000G series APUs to the new System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series. There were 268 original news articles and another 15 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles on Phoronix during the last month. With all that daily original content, here's a look back at the most popular news and reviews from January...

Last week CodeWeavers engineer Elizabeth Figura posted the initial patches for a Windows NT synchronization primitive driver for Linux for exposing /dev/ntsync for exposing some synchronization primitives available under Windows directly within the Linux kernel. This has the potential of sharply speeding up some Windows games and applications running under Wine on Linux or the likes of Valve's Steam Play (Proton). This week a second iteration of the patches were posted...

AMD on Wednesday evening released ROCm 6.0.2 as the newest point release to their open-source compute stack...

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers...

In addition to this week's release of GNU Binutils 2.42, ending out January is the release of the GNU C Library 2.39. This C library "libc" update comes with several new features, security fixes, and other enhancements...

You may recall from a few months back that the "open-source Windows" project ReactOS was going to be working on improving its GUI setup/installation. Progress is indeed being made there as shared in the latest ReactOS blog entry around further enhancing its GUI installer as an alternative to the text-mode setup...

Back in November 2022 AMD announced Brotli-G for GPU-accelerated Brotli compression. Brotli has proven very worthwhile for compressing web assets and other material while AMD's Brotli-G modifies the bitstream format to be more optimal for handling by GPUs rather than just relying on CPU (de)compression. Today Brotli-G 1.0 was finally released...

The newest frontier by the Linux Foundation is getting involved with coming up with a formal file format specification for Lottie, the vector graphics animation format based on JSON...

Posted at the start of 2022 was a set of 2.3k patches dubbed "fast kernel headers" to massively speed-up build times for compiling the kernel and to address dependency hell situations. While it was quick to iterate at first and some bits got upstreamed, it's been months since hearing anything new on the fast kernel headers topic. But today a new patch series was posted that's restarting the effort in working towards massively speeding up kernel build times...

Here's a fresh look at the AMD Radeon versus NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics/gaming performance across a variety of workloads as well as our first look at the GeForce RTX 4070 series and RTX 4080 SUPER performance. With recently receiving the rest of the GeForce RTX 40 series line-up currently released, we're now able to share a comprehensive look at how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series versus AMD Radeon RX 7000 series performance is under Linux.

Releasing at the end of February is the much anticipated Plasma 6.0 desktop where the Wayland session is the default. Plasma 6.0 will be joined by KDE Frameworks 6.0 and the Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps too. Out today for closing out January is the second release candidate of these packages...

LibreOffice 24.2 is now available as the latest major update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office...

Merged overnight for Linux 6.8 is enhancing the EROFS read-only open-source file-system to perform better in low-memory scenarios. Not just better, but significantly better performance...

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for improved thermal/power/performance behavior under Linux works for Zen 2 and newer systems where the platform exposes ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) support. There's been a caveat though of the "amd_pstate" driver having issues for the Zen2-based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. With a newly-published set of patches, that issue should be resolved...

The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux...

Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation...

While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux...

AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP...