Phoronix

GRUB 2.06 was released back in June of 2021 and today it's finally been succeeded by... GRUB 2.12. This latest GRUB stable release has been a long time coming but it's finally out before the new year and it's packing many features for this widely-used open-source bootloader...

For those with some extra time on your hands around the holidays, the second beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6.0 is now available for testing...

Yesterday I posted the first Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarks that were focused on the CPU capabilities with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Ubuntu Linux compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. The strictly CPU core performance ended up being rather disappointing with the AMD Zen 4 laptop dominating in most cases at similar or better power efficiency. But where things become much more interesting -- and competitive -- with Meteor Lake is on the integrated graphics side now featuring Arc Graphics. The benchmarks today is our first look at the new Meteor Lake Arc Graphics with the Core 7 Ultra 155H while comparing it to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the prior generation Intel integrated graphics.

The first beta of the Qt 6.7 toolkit is now available for some holiday-time testing...

With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel...

Ikey Doherty who is known for his work starting Solus Linus as well as the Budgie desktop while also formerly working on Intel's Clear Linux and other open-source software contributions has most recently been working on his newest endeavour: Serpent OS. A end-of-year development summary has now been posted that outlines the latest work on this Linux distribution...

QEMU 8.2 has been released as the newest update for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

A new version of Sound Open Firmware is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware and development tools. For what began as an Intel open-source project for open-source sound firmware is now seeing ongoing adoption by AMD, MediaTek, and other vendors. Sound Open Firmware 2.8 has been released ahead of the holidays...

It's just not old wired and wireless networking drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel but as part of some winter-time cleaning a set of patches have been posted that would remove much of the remaining SPARC32 support for old 32-bit Sun workstations...

Last week Intel launched their Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" notebook processors. Genuinely very curious about the performance potential under Linux along with various features of these new mobile SoCs like the NPU and integrated Arc Graphics, I bought an Intel Core Ultra laptop on launch-day for carrying out Linux benchmarks. In this first review of Intel Meteor Lake on Linux is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H performs against the common AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as the Zen 4 laptop competition.

The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs...

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems...

As what's likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift...

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle...

Set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the IAA crypto compression driver for allowing users of the Linux kernel's compression API to make use of the Intel Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found with Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids Xeon server processors...

While much of the focus by Linux desktops as we roll into 2024 is polishing off their Wayland support, there does exist a rather innovative display server out there that's been in the works for years: Arcan. Arcan is the open-source project built atop a game engine and provides a display server paired with a real-time multimedia framework for audio and video. Arcan can be used from embedded purposes through full desktop solutions and can also interact with Wayland and X11 as well as embracing VR. Arcan 0.6.3 was released today along with the announcement that they've taken on some funding...

By now you've likely heard how Intel's Gaudi2 accelerator hardware is standing up very well against the NVIDIA competition especially in value. There's nothing new there but an important part to keep in mind -- and where Intel is the hands-down winner -- is the open-source ecosystem with having a fully open-source and upstream Linux kernel accelerator driver as well as their SynapseAI open-source components in user-space. The Gaudi2 open-source kernel driver support is now considered "very stable at this point" with the upstream state fairing well...

Yesterday the initial code for supporting the Alliance For Open Media's Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) was merged for the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library...

The Nintendo HID open-source driver is being extended with the Linux 6.8 kernel to support the Nintendo Switch Online "NSO" controllers...

Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!..