Phoronix

Posted at the start of 2022 was a set of 2.3k patches dubbed "fast kernel headers" to massively speed-up build times for compiling the kernel and to address dependency hell situations. While it was quick to iterate at first and some bits got upstreamed, it's been months since hearing anything new on the fast kernel headers topic. But today a new patch series was posted that's restarting the effort in working towards massively speeding up kernel build times...

Here's a fresh look at the AMD Radeon versus NVIDIA GeForce Linux graphics/gaming performance across a variety of workloads as well as our first look at the GeForce RTX 4070 series and RTX 4080 SUPER performance. With recently receiving the rest of the GeForce RTX 40 series line-up currently released, we're now able to share a comprehensive look at how the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series versus AMD Radeon RX 7000 series performance is under Linux.

Releasing at the end of February is the much anticipated Plasma 6.0 desktop where the Wayland session is the default. Plasma 6.0 will be joined by KDE Frameworks 6.0 and the Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps too. Out today for closing out January is the second release candidate of these packages...

LibreOffice 24.2 is now available as the latest major update to this leading cross-platform, free software office suite to compete with the likes of Microsoft Office...

Merged overnight for Linux 6.8 is enhancing the EROFS read-only open-source file-system to perform better in low-memory scenarios. Not just better, but significantly better performance...

The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for improved thermal/power/performance behavior under Linux works for Zen 2 and newer systems where the platform exposes ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Controls (CPPC) support. There's been a caveat though of the "amd_pstate" driver having issues for the Zen2-based Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series. With a newly-published set of patches, that issue should be resolved...

The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux...

Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation...

While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux...

AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP...

For fans of the Ubuntu Touch platform maintained by UBports for enjoying Linux on tablets and smartphones is out with their 4th Over The Air update based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base...

With Ubuntu looking at applying their low-latency optimizations to their generic kernel builds in order to eliminate maintaining their existing "lowlatency" kernel option, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance impact of their low-latency kernel against their "generic" default kernel used on Ubuntu Linux systems...

The GNOME project has announced the GNOME Project Handbook as a new resource for helping new developers/contributors get involved with this open-source desktop environment...

For AMD Zen 2 and newer systems making use of the modern AMD P-State driver on Linux for CPU frequency scaling, ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) interface is being used. For managing the ACPI CPPC energy performance preference (EPP), Intel's x86_energy_perf_policy utility is now being extended to AMD processors...

ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero...

As I wrote about at the start of January, the open-source ATI Radeon R300 Linux graphics driver continues seeing new improvements even all these years later thanks to the open-source community. This wasn't some one-off work either in 2024 for this R300 to R500 GPU OpenGL driver but more work has since landed...

Following the recent branching of LLVM 18, LLVM 18.1-rc1 was released today as the first test candidate for this half-year update of this widely-used open-source compiler stack...

As a follow-up to last week's article around the GCC compiler seeing patches for AMD RDNA3 GPU support so that it's "working for most purposes", that code has now been merged and it's also been confirmed to also bring the RDNA2 support up to a working state...

Linux hardware vendor Purism that is known for their crowd-funded Librem 5 smartphone effort, Linux-loaded laptops, and other privacy-minded wares announced a first public offering of Purism stock on the StartEngine platform...

It looks like the Red Hat change restricting access to RHEL sources that was announced last year is having the unintended consequence of causing some headaches for CentOS special interest group (SIG) projects...