Phoronix

Alpine Linux 3.19 has been released as the newest feature update to this lightweight Linux distribution employing Busybox and libc...

As an early Christmas present for Linux kernel developers and others keeping track of kernel development, the git.kernel.org Cgit web interface has rolled out native dark mode support...

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October...

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser...

The Red Hat engineers responsible for creating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) are celebrating tonight with LVFS paired with the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility now having served more than 100 million firmware updates!..

Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines...

In addition to AMD using its AI event today for launching the Instinct MI300A and MI300X along with ROCm 6.0, AMD also announced the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors. A big emphasis with these forthcoming laptop processors is on the AI capabilities between the dedicated NPU with AMD XDNA, Zen 4 CPU cores with AVX-512 VNNI support, and AMD RDNA3 graphics capable of accelerating AI.

At AMD's AI event today the company provided more details on their Instinct MI300 series for their very exciting data center APU and CDNA3 discrete GPU accelerator. ROCm 6.0 was also announced for advancing AMD's AI software capabilities.

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community...

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks...

Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot...

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors...

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new "GFX12" hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed...

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives...

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to "several times faster" than the existing JSON functions...

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There's been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey...

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

Following the SLOB allocator removal earlier this year, the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is now positioned to remove the SLAB allocator. Additionally, the lone good-for-everything SLUB allocator is set to receive further optimizations...

GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility...

Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop...