Phoronix

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage...

The Bochs Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver is in the process of being modernized. The Bochs driver is important in that it's commonly used for virtual VGA output with QEMU for Linux virtualization...

Vulkan 1.3.294 is out today with a handful of fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the maintenance work, Vulkan 1.3.294 introduces a new pipeline binary extension: VK_KHR_pipeline_binary...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue feverishly working on the Xe2 graphics support both for imminently-launching Lunar Lake laptops and then the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. This week more "missing bits" were addressed in new Intel Linux graphics driver code on its way to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window...

A set of a dozen patches have reworked the video encode handling within Mesa 24.3 for the Video Acceleration (VA) front-end and the RadeonSI/VCN driver code. This rework aims to enable new features moving forward, enhance the overall driver, and bring "significant" memory savings for H.265/HEVC video encoding...

As part of catering to Google requirements around Google Chromebooks, AMD has been supporting Sound Open Firmware as the Intel-initiated open-source project across their APUs/SoCs. Sent out today was the patch for enabling ACP 7.0 SOF support for their newest SoCs like Strix Point to have Sound Open Firmware support...

In addition to System76 software engineers being busy working on their new COSMIC desktop environment, on Thursday they also released a new version of the System76 Scheduler that is used by Pop!_OS...

While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled...

The upstream Linux "oxp-sensors" driver began as a driver for supporting the sensors on the OneXPlayer handheld. With time this driver has been extended to support more handheld gaming consoles and a new patch enables support for several more devices...

KDE Gear 24.08 has been released for this collection of KDE applications that pair with the Plasma desktop...

With the exception of critical security issues/bugs, Canonical will be skipping over shipping stable release updates for the Linux kernel in Ubuntu until early October...

The Mozilla Ocho group leads "innovation and experiments" at Mozilla. Following all of their work on Llamafile for easily distributing large language models as a single file that can be easily executed across different hardware/software, their newest effort is Whisperfile for easy audio-to-text translations...

Intel software engineers are responsible for many of the great x86_64-related optimizations to the GNU C Library "glibc" over the years. While they've extensively tuned many Glibc functions for achieving peak performance on their modern CPUs, it's a never-ending quest. Merged this week was another optimization to strnlen(), the function for determining the number of bytes in a fixed-size string...

While celebrating the 9th birthday of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes has released a new version of the Fwupd firmware updating utility...

LibreOffice 24.8 is officially out today as the latest major feature update to this open-source office suite that's the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office. With LibreOffice 24.8 comes many new features throughout its various components...

Google has promoted Chrome 128 to its stable channel across macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms...

Intel's uncore Linux platform driver is preparing for a new feature found on newer SoCs: ELC, or Efficiency Latency Control. This ELC feature for the Intel uncore handling allows fine tuning efficiency versus latency characteristics...

As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued...

This week marks nine years since the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was started by Richard Hughes of Red Hat to ease the firmware updating/distribution process with the open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility...

Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems...