Phoronix

While the original AMD Navi GPUs featured Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support, it was borked for some GPUs and initially didn't work out quite as well as planned for vertex and geometry processing. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has worked on the NGG code for years and with RDNA3 GPUs it's finally been working out very well from the start and better than their legacy pipeline. All the while the RDNA1/RDNA2 experimental NGG stream-out support has continued to exist but hidden behind a feature/debug flag. That code is now being removed...

GhostBSD 23.10.1 released this weekend as the newest version of this FreeBSD-based desktop-focused operating system that employs the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop by default...

Guenter Roeck today sent out the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 merge window...

Another merge window, another attempt for Bcachefs to be mainlined. This file-system was submitted again today for the now-open Linux 6.7 merge window and it stands better chances this cycle of being upstreamed...

Following the Linux 6.6 release, the GNU FSFLA folks are out with their GNU Linux-libre 6.6 downstream that strips out support for proprietary kernel modules, code considered non-free, and other de-blobbing activities in the name of software freedom...

Linux's FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework allows for native file encryption support on the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS. FSCRYPT can make use of inline encryption hardware for accelerating the file-system encryption support and with the Linux 6.7 kernel will work for more scenarios...

While Mozilla has always produced Firefox Nightly builds for Linux as traditional binaries, they have finally decided to offer up an APT repository of Firefox Nightly builds to make it easy to stay up-to-date with new Firefox Nightly releases on Debian and Ubuntu Linux based distributions...

As anticipated Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.6 kernel as stable...

While KDE Plasma 6 and associated KDE software components are getting ready for their debut in February, Trinity Desktop continues loosely maintaining a KDE 3.5 fork for that aging desktop environment...

It's slightly off its usual Friday release target, but Wine 8.19 was released today as the newest bi-weekly unstable release of this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

From the perspective of Linux distributions trying to reduce their attack surface while still making it possible for users to run legacy software without recompiling their kernel, SUSE has spearheaded the effort for boot-time enabling/disabling of x86 32-bit support for whether 32-bit user-space programs and 32-bit system calls can be executed. That code has been submitted for the imminent Linux 6.7 merge window...

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser...

A NVIDIA compiler engineer last week laid out the company's plans for implementing OpenACC 3.3 offloading support within the LLVM Clang compiler...

One of the many early pull requests sent in for Linux 6.7 were the x86/boot changes that are headlined by a rework to the PE header generation in order to generate a modern, 4K-aligned kernel image view to ultimately aim for better system security...

While the Linux 6.6 kernel isn't set to be released until later today, over the weekend a number of early pull requests were submitted of new material for the Linux 6.7 merge window. Among those early PRs were for the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) area of the kernel...

With Linux 6.6 expected to be released tomorrow as stable, the Linux 6.7 merge window in turn will be opened. Here's a preview of some of the changes expected for this next kernel cycle...

A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR)...

Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks...

Patches posted this week by SiFive for the Linux kernel provide cryptographic implementations of various functions inside the Linux kernel using the processor ISA's vector crypto extensions...