Phoronix

A big set of patches have been submitted for DRM-Next of "new stuff" to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and the AMDKFD compute driver with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel cycle...

With Mesa's RADV driver supporting Vulkan Video for accelerated video encode/decode using this cross-platform, industry standard API it hasn't been exposed by default for RDNA3 graphics processors bearing VCN4 IP. That has now changed for Mesa 24.3 when using the latest VCN4 firmware...

Oracle engineers continue working on the TrenchBoot initiative to advance boot security and integrity for Linux. The tenth iteration of the TrenchBoot patches were posted this week as it works its way toward the mainline kernel...

Miracle-WM as the Mir-powered Wayland compositor inspired by i3 and Sway is out with another new release. It's rather ironic that while Miracle-WM is principally developed by a Canonical engineer associated with Ubuntu Linux, these recent Miracle-WM releases are being driven in part by preparing for a Fedora Miracle spin due out as part of the Fedora Linux 41 release in October...

The Godot open-source, cross-platform game engine continues advancing wonderfully as an alternative to the more well established but proprietary and commercial-focused game engines. Godot 4.4 Dev 1 released today as the first tagged development snapshot toward the next version of this great game engine...

Cemu is the Wii U emulator that went open-source and began building on Linux two years ago. Since then they've continued building up their Linux support and out today is the Cemu 2.1 emulator release with even better Linux support...

Last week an AmpereOne server finally arrived at Phoronix! Ampere Computing sent over a reviewer server of the AmpereOne A192-32X flagship AArch64 server processor with 192 custom cores and using a Supermicro ARS-211M-NR R13SPD platform. I have been carrying out a number of benchmarks for this much-anticipated AArch64 cloud native processor and have initial performance and power efficiency metrics to share today to see how it compares to prior Ampere Altra Max as well as the Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server competition.

In addition to the recent news of AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborating over improvements, some more good news for this leading BSD open-source project is the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) now beginning to invest in FreeBSD...

Ubuntu maker Canonical partnered with AMD for supporting Ubuntu Linux on the AMD-Xilinx Kria development boards for their UltraScale+ / Versal Adaptive SoC evaluation kit. Currently the official builds are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS but it appears an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS build is being worked on and will come complete with Wayland support...

Earlier this month Intel compiler engineers began adding AVX10.2 support into the GCC 15 open-source compiler. Now as we approach the end of August, another big batch of AVX10.2 enablement has landed for this next GNU Compiler Collection release...

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land...

Released on Sunday night was a new version of the Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) Zstd plug-in for accelerating Zstandard compression with QAT-enabled adapters and modern Xeon Scalable processors sporting QAT accelerators...

Linux 6.11 as often is the case each kernel cycle brings a lot of new improvements for recent/upcoming Intel and AMD platforms. There are big step forwards for AMD confidential computing, initial RDNA4 graphics support, new AMD P-State driver features, and much more on the AMD side. On the Intel side there is ongoing work around Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage but not yet stable. Intel also has initial Panther Lake audio support, more NPU driver enhancements, and a range of other kernel additions to benefit their platforms.

The Linux 6.11-rc5 kernel is already out as stable today, roughly a half-day ahead of time due to travels by Linus Torvalds...

Codon is an open-source project that leverages the LLVM compiler infrastructure and aims for super fast Python code with as much as 10~100x speedups. Released this week was Codon 0.17 as the newest step forward for this alternative Python implementation...

Just one week after the Archinstall 2.8.2 update, another release of this command-line driven Arch Linux installer is now available for quick and easy Arch deployments...

As the first new release in more than one year, GNU DDD 3.4.1 is now available as a GUI front-end to the GNU Debugger (GDB)...

Mesa's PanVK driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Arm Mali graphics is preparing to support newer "Valhall" hardware...

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer...

FreeBSD 13.4-RC1 has been released ahead of its planned official release in early September. While the FreeBSD 14 series delivers the latest and greatest, FreeBSD 13.4 is a nice incremental update for those still depending upon a FreeBSD 13 base...