Phoronix

One of the big milestones we are looking forward to in 2024 is the introduction of AMD Zen 5 processors. AMD Linux engineers have in recent months begun getting ready for those next-generation processors that look like will be Family 26 (1Ah) processors. We've been seeing more of the AMD "1Ah" patches and some more were posted today for some post-Christmas excitement before the new year...

Intel Linux engineers continue eagerly working on the Compute Express Link (CXL) code for the Linux kernel with more server hardware coming to market supporting this high-speed open standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections...

As part of AMD's Platform Management Framework (PMF) and working on new Ryzen features like the Smart PC Solutions Builder, a set of patches are queued up ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle support for policy binary support with the PMF driver...

Similar to the long-worked-on GNOME dynamic triple buffering that is applied when the (most commonly integrated) graphics fall behind schedule in rendering the desktop, a merge request for KDE's KWin compositor has also seen similar work in this area for helping the iGPU catch-up in rendering via a "triple buffering" implementation...

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation...

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors...

Along with all of the other ongoing Intel Arrow Lake processor/platform enablement, the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel will have the sound driver support ready for landing...

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to those celebrating any end-of-year holidays. In case you missed last month's cyber week special for a discounted rate on going ad-free, native dark mode, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits, it's back for Christmas week...

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations...

Intel's open-source Linux drivers for OpenGL (Iris) and Vulkan (ANV) this week for Mesa 24.0 received support for dual-SIMD8 dispatch on Gen12 graphics (Tigerlake) and newer...

While the Linux 6.7 release is being pushed back by one week due to the holidays and in turn the Linux 6.8 merge window not officially opening until 8 January, some pull requests do end up getting submitted early. The 1-wire bus driver changes for Linux 6.8 were sent out this week and most notably includes adding the AMD AXI 1-wire host driver...

With the Linux 6.7 kernel there is now KVM virtualization support for LoongArch CPUs. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, that KVM support is being further extended for these RISC-V-inspired and MIPS64-derived Chinese processors...

New upstream Linux kernel releases are typically issued on Sunday evenings (US time) but Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.7-rc7 a day early in preparations for Christmas Eve festivities...

It's been two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.25 and now just ahead of Christmas there is Enlightenment 0.26 released by Carsten Haitzler...

Following discussions with upstream developers, LLVM is changing its versioning as part of the branch creation process to better distinguish mainline development builds of LLVM against those from stable (or soon to be stable) release branches...

With a set of input driver patches set to be merged today for the Linux 6.7-rc6 kernel, the XPad driver is adding support for Razer's Wolverine V2 Xbox controller...

This week brought the second beta of KDE Plasma 6.0 along with KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks updates too. The holidays haven't resulted in KDE development slowing down too much with still a number of bug fixes being merged this week and other minor enhancements...

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager...

For those still relying on GNU Autoconf for generating configure scripts for building/installing/packaging software rather than more modern alternatives like CMake and Meson, Autoconf 2.72 is out today as a nice holiday treat...