Phoronix

Wednesday's small Steam client beta update should fix a crash when starting the Steam client when no OpenGL drivers are found...

It's a big day today in the open-source NVIDIA Nouveau/NVK space... The Mesa NVK driver is now officially declared a Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation by the Khronos Group! In turn the NVK driver is no longer considered experimental and with Mesa 24.1 will build by default for x86/x86_64-based installations...

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed...

Besides the integrated RDNA3 graphics making the Ryzen 8000G series desktop APUs interesting, making the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G a fun benchmarking target besides its sub-$200 price tag is having a mix of Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C performance and power efficiency when offlining various core combinations on the Ryzen 5 8500G desktop processor.

Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework...

Being worked on and off for several years has been FUSE read/write passthrough support for improving the performance of File-Systems in User-Space by avoiding the daemon overhead on a per-file basis where read/write operations are forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower file-system rather than the FUSE daemon. FUSE passthrough mode has shown to be a big performance win and it looks like it could be finally mainlined come Linux 6.9...

Upstreamed for Linux 6.8 is the experimental Xe kernel graphics driver that is a modern replacement to the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe kernel driver targets Tigerlake graphics and newer while it won't be until Lunar Lake / Xe2 when it aims to become the default driver for Intel iGPU/dGPU graphics. For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window are more feature changes and fixes to this new open-source Intel kernel graphics driver...

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within the Mesa codebase has merged support for the important VK_EXT_shader_object and VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extensions. Additionally, as part of supporting these new extensions, this introduces the code for a common Vulkan runtime to Mesa...

The Servo web engine project has put out a new blog post that outlines all of their accomplishments made during the course of February...

Today's the day! KDE MegaRelease 6 is out for shipping Plasma 6.0, KDE Frameworks 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 apps...

Daniel Almeida with Collabora has posted a rewritten of the VP9 codec library code within the Linux kernel's Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) subsystem. In using Rust rather than the existing C code, this should yield better memory safety and better fend off potential issues within the existing code...

Continuing to bring-up the Wine Wayland driver for offering native Wayland support without X11/XWayland, Alexandros Frantzis opened the pull request today for enabling basic OpenGL support...

By default the AArch64 kernel on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions tend to default to a standard 4K page size but for newer AArch64 hardware especially in the server/HPC space, there can be great benefits to using a 64K page size. As it's been a while since I last ran any 64-bit ARM 4K vs. 64K kernel page size benchmarks, while having remote access to the NVIDIA GH200 I ran a fresh comparison for looking at the performance advantages to switching over to a 64K page size kernel. These new 64K kernel numbers are shown alongside the recent AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon CPU reference benchmark results for a look at how the 4K vs. 64K page size affects the overall computing landscape.

Ahead of this week's big KDE Plasma 6.0 release, the KWinFT project forked from the KDE KWin compositor code is re-branding as Theseus' Ship...

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the Libre-SoC project that for the past 5+ years has been wanting to build a libre/open-source SoC for graphics acceleration and other uses...

The Mold high performance linker has long been known for offering excellent performance over GNU Gold/ld and LLVM lld while some fresh benchmark numbers reinforce the competitive advantage that persists today for this open-source project...

With the Mesa 24.1-devel Git code as of this morning, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 for Vulkan Video accelerated decoding of AV1 video content...

The Linux kernel has supported the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" via the "intel_hfi" driver since 2022 for bettering supporting Core hybrid processors. The Intel HFI can be used for communicating performance and energy efficiency capabilities of individual CPU cores of the system. In turn the Linux kernel can leverage Intel HFI details for better task placement among the available CPU cores/threads. With a new patch series, the Intel HFI driver can "save tons of CPU cycles" by only enabling it when needed...

It looks like AMD will soon be announcing the ROCm 6.1 update to its open-source GPU compute stack...

The first release candidate of FreeBSD 13.3 is now available for testing. While FreeBSD 14 stable has been out now for months, FreeBSD 13.3 is the latest in the prior series for those continuing to rely on FreeBSD 13 in production...