Phoronix

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11...

As part of Red Hat evaluating x86-64-v3 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, there is the CentOS ISA SIG that's been experimenting with ISA Optimized builds for the x86-64-v3 target. Via the CentOS ISA SIG there is the easy ability to transition an existing CentOS Stream 9 system/server over to using the x86_64-v3 optimized packages. In this article are some benchmarks on a modern Intel Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" server showing the performance benefits when the entire Linux server OS is recompiled for x86_64-v3.

The Linux DeviceMapper code is preparing to introduce DM-VDO as the Virtual Data Optimizer that can provide inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, thin provisioning, and other features. DM-VDO has long existed out-of-tree and should be a very useful addition to mainline...

For those interested in FPGAs, AMD today unveiled the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA product family with hardware coming in 2025...

FEX as the open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux systems continues making good progress not for only enjoying Linux x86 binaries on ARM but also Windows games by way of Steam Play / Wine...

While still an experimental option, the rolling-release systemd Tumbleweed Linux distribution is finding great results in using systemd-boot rather than the GRUB bootloader...

For those still on the FreeBSD 13 series with not having migrated yet to FreeBSD 14, FreeBSD 13.3 was released overnight as the newest incremental update to this mature BSD platform...

GStreamer 1.24 is out today as a major enhancement to this open-source multimedia framework...

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand...

Xiph.Org's Opus open-source audio format for lossy audio coding has rolled out Opus 1.5 as a big update that is now making greater use of machine learning...

Open-source developer Roman Gilg who is known for his work on KWinFT prior to its rebranding as Theseus' Ship has some more important news to share today by way of Phoronix. Here's his guest post announcing The Compositor Modules.

While there is a lot of frustration from the news last week of the HDMI Forum rejecting AMD's open-source HDMI 2.1 driver support plans, the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver won't hopefully have too challenging of an experience in enabling HDMI 2.1 functionality since much of the display handling there is left up to NVIDIA's (closed-source) firmware binaries...

When it comes to the AMD "RDNA3 Refresh" GFX11.5 open-source driver support, to date it's mostly been focused on the GFX 11.5.0 (GFX1150) IP while now being enabled within Mesa 24.1 for the open-source RadeonSI/RADV drivers is support for a GFX 11.5.1 (GFX1151) variant...

The VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer extension was made public in November 2022 with Vulkan 1.3.235 while finally this past week Intel's open-source Mesa "ANV" driver has merged support for this extension. This Vulkan extension is important for Linux gaming and other scenarios to lower CPU overhead...

It was two years since the release of Pacman 6.0 as Arch Linux's package manager software while overnight Pacman 6.1 was released with a tag line "it's been a while..." With Pacman 6.1 comes a few new features...

With the absence of any official AMD Radeon graphics control panel / settings GUI for Linux enthusiasts/gamers, there are several open-source projects striving to be a viable Radeon GUI control area for Linux gamers/enthusiasts. LACT 0.5.3 was released this weekend as the newest version of this option for AMD Radeon information reporting, GPU overclocking, fan control, power/thermal monitoring, and additional power state configurations...

For those that have experienced glitches while playing back VP9 video content using AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) for GPU acceleration, updated firmware should fix those VP9 decode problems...

Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 6.8-rc7 as we close in on the Linux 6.8 stable release in the next week or two...

In preparation for the GNOME 46 release candidate, the "46.rc" versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter were published this morning. The release candidate work is mostly about fixing outstanding issues but there are also some lingering fixes that made it into these releases...

OpenMediaVault 7.0 was released today as a major update to this open-source Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution built around Debian Linux. This plug-based NAS platform with web UI allows supporting a variety of services/protocols is now even more capable with the OpenMediaVault 7.0 availability...