Phoronix

While the Linux 6.8 merge window isn't opening for another week, the Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have already been mailed in to Linus Torvalds for this next merge window...

Picked up this week by the Linux sound subsystem's "next" development branch is a number of additions to the Scarlett USB audio mixer driver for supporting this audio hardware under Linux...

Over the course of 2023 on Phoronix were more than 2,780 original news articles and more than 180 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. In the month of December alone were 211 original news articles and 20 featured articles/reviews. Here's a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source crowd over the final month of 2023...

For this New Year's Eve the decision was made to release Linux 6.7-rc8 to allow for an extra week of testing -- and pushing back the Linux 6.8 merge window further past the holidays -- rather than releasing Linux 6.7 stable today. As such, Linux 6.7-rc8 is out for a final week of testing this new kernel...

OpenCV 4.9 released on Friday as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library...

The GNU Boot project has been in the works as a Coreboot/Libreboot fork focused on "freedom respecting boot firmware" that is free from closed-source and proprietary components. But in working towards its inaugural v0.1 release, they discovered that they had inadvertently been shipping some non-free software around AMD CPU microcode updates and some motherboard ports with non-open-source code...

This New Year's weekend brought the latest AMD patches working on plumbing the mainline Linux kernel with the hypervisor support around AMD Secure Nested Paging (SNP) as part of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). SEV-SNP has been supported since EPYC 7003 series and while some elements of the support have been upstreamed for securing VMs, some bits remain...

With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator...

The Xiph.Org project Rav1e to provide the fastest and safest AV1 encoder by leveraging the Rust programming language is ending out 2023 with a new feature release...

Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics...

ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles...

Added last year to the open-source compilers were Intel RAO-INT instructions for upcoming Intel CPUs. RAO-INT as new atomic ADD / AND / OR / XOR instructions were to debut with Intel's Grand Ridge SoC but now that is apparently no longer the case...

In addition to Ubuntu exploring the possibility of x86_64-v3 builds/packages, a proposal has been raised for Fedora Linux with its current Fedora 40 cycle to provide the ability to offer optimized x86_64 (AMD64) binaries based upon the CPU's x86_64 micro-architecture feature level...

Merged on Friday for Mesa 24.0-devel in Q1 is support for the VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix extension with Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...

LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series...

Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 Focal is out today as the UBport's latest release of this Ubuntu mobile adaptation for smartphones and tablets. This is the third release to be based on their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, which is quite aging at this point but still better off than their earlier 16.04 LTS foundation...

The Gentoo Linux project's Portage package manager has long supported the ability to deal with binary packages while moving forward they are finally leveraging that to offer binary packages for download and direct installation...

Yesterday I ran through a number of benchmarks looking at how the Intel integrated graphics have evolved from the Gen9/Skylake era through the new Meteor Lake CPUs with integrated Arc Graphics. While carrying out those graphics tests with being infatuated by the performance and power efficiency of Meteor Lake integrated graphics, I also took the opportunity to run 100+ CPU benchmarks on each of these laptop CPUs / Intel mobile processor generations being tested. Here's that look at the Intel CPU performance and power efficiency comparison from Whiskey Lake to Meteor Lake.

With my Intel Meteor Lake benchmarking that began last week with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H within an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the area I've been most impressed by so far with this new generation of Intel mobile processors is the integrated Arc Graphics performance. In a prior article I showed how Intel Meteor Lake graphics are a big upgrade and now competing with AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics while also capable of delivering better power efficiency. That led me to some curiosity-driven holiday benchmarking to show how Meteor Lake graphics have evolved over the past several generations of Intel mobile processors.

Similar to Intel and AMD processors with not all cores necessarily being created equal, Zhaoxin engineers are working on plumbing preferred core support for their processors into the Linux kernel...