Phoronix

As part of the Red Hat led effort for making XWayland's rootful mode more useful and the ability to run X11 desktop sessions within XWayland as part of RHEL 10 dropping the X.Org Server support besides XWayland, a new "-output" option was added to XWayland for better control over placement of rootful fullscreen windows...

Intel Compute Runtime 23.39.27427.23 has been released today as the newest version of this open-source GPU compute stack for Windows and Linux systems for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. The Compute Runtime works from aging Broadwell and Skylake/Gen9 graphics up through the latest DG2 discrete graphics and the recently launched Meteor Lake processors with their much improved integrated graphics...

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel display/graphics driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel. As expected and to much excitement, the experimental new Xe kernel graphics driver is included for introduction in Linux 6.8 as well as the Imagination PowerVR driver for select Rogue GPUs. Plus there's new AMDGPU driver additions and other improvements with this pull, including the initial AMD color management code...

Mesa 24.0 feature development has concluded for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers most notably for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics on Linux but also an increasing number of smaller drivers, like for Apple Silicon, the NVK / Nouveau drivers, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan, and more...

Linux 6.8 is continuing the work toward allowing the sysctl sentinel to be removed, the final empty element on sysctl arrays. This ongoing effort will in turn allow for saving an extra 64 bytes on each sysctl array and will enhance the build time size of the kernel...

With it being nearly one year since the release of Qt 6.5 LTS and Qt 6.6 having debuted in October, The Qt Company has not put Qt 6.5 LTS into its commercial-only phase with today's Qt 6.5.4 release...

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year...

It's not too often hearing Linus Torvalds himself raising the alarm bells over performance regressions of the Linux kernel, but that happened this evening with the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window. Torvalds' AMD Ryzen Threadripper system suddenly was suffering from much longer build times at least as a result of new code for this kernel...

While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4'2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting...

Following the Bcachefs file-system having finally been upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel, with the Linux 6.8 merge window now ticking the file-system's lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted a set of feature additions and performance optimizations to this copy-on-write (CoW) file-system...

Last year the online repair functionality for XFS began to land with the Linux 6.6 kernel. For the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel, more online repair support for the XFS file-system is now ready...

In working toward the stable release of Plasma 6.0 at the end of February, today marks the release candidate of Plasma 6.0 along with the updated Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0 that comprise the "KDE 6th Megarelease" software...

Linux 4.14 debuted at the end of 2017 with exciting features at the time like AMD Vega improvements, working on the since-failed Intel Cannonlake graphics, Zstd compression support, and more. The kernel has advanced a heck of a lot since then and Linux 6.7 recently debuted. It's now time that Linux 4.14 LTS has been declared end-of-life...

A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code...

The tooling changes around the perf subsystem have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window and provide some new hardware features and other new perf profiling capabilities...

Intel engineers have released their FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q4 release, the quarterly set of updates to the FFmpeg multimedia library that they are still working to get upstreamed where appropriate but for now is a convenient home to all of their interesting FFmpeg patches from improved video acceleration for Intel graphics hardware to neural network features still being developed and other patches that aren't yet ready for inclusion into upstream FFmpeg...

Along with the Linux 6.8 power management updates, maintainer Rafael Wysocki at Intel also sent in the ACPI updates for this next kernel version. While the ACPI changes for the kernel are often just routine churn, this cycle it's bringing a new feature: device enumeration for CSI-2 and MIPI DisCo for Imaging support. This will allow MIPI cameras moving forward to be enumerated via the platform firmware on ACPI-based systems...

Coming out of Saarland University is Vcc, the Vulkan Clang Compiler. Vcc provides an "honest attempt to bring the entire C/C++ language family to Vulkan" as an interesting new compiler...

The latest notable feature addition for Mesa 24.0 worth mentioning is to NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver for providing increasingly robust Vulkan API support on this alternative to NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver...

Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections...