Phoronix

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced...

While not talked about as much as the AMD open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux, AMD's multimedia stack on Linux continues to be improved upon for supporting new use-cases with AMD-based Linux deployments continuing to come up in the embedded space for all different applications like in-vehicle infotainment systems. The newest AMD video acceleration feature to now be wired up to their open-source Mesa code is enabling region of interest (ROI) encoding functionality...

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver...

A new Long-Term Support version of Cloud Hypervisor was released this week, which is the open-source project originally started by Intel as a cloud-focused and Rust-written VMM that now has wide industry backing including from multiple other CPU vendors...

Back in October the Milk-V Oasis mITX board was announced with this RISC-V board being powered by a 16-core Sophgo SG2380 SoC featuring SiFive-designed cores: 12 P cores and four E cores. While that Milk-V Oasis board isn't expected to ship until Q3'2024, Milk-V shared this week that the SG2380 RISC-V SoC has been revised with additional capabilities...

As part of Intel's ongoing quest for maximizing the compute performance of their GPUs/accelerators, their compiler engineers have proposed introducing a XeGPU dialect for LLVM's MLIR...

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward...

A change merged to the X.Org Server Git for the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver is helping conserve some power consumption at least for Intel graphics by determining the optimal hardware cursor size...

On Friday in addition to Intel submitting their new Xe kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.8, the red team sent in their latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes ahead of this next kernel cycle. Exciting on the AMD side is landing the AMD color management properties support! But on the downside, it's compile-time disabled for the time being...

Manjaro 23.1 was released overnight as the newest version of this popular Arch Linux based desktop Linux distribution...

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems...

KDE developers remain very busy working toward the release of the Plasma 6 desktop in late February...

As I wrote about last week that Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it's indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer -- both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators...

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024...

Earlier this month at AMD's AI event in San Francisco they announced ROCm 6.0 while launching the MI300X and MI300A accelerators. While announced back on the 6th, today marks the actual availability of ROCm 6.0 with the source code and binaries now publicly available...

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop...

With Intel's just-launched 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" processors headlined by the 64-core Xeon Platinum 8592+, one of the key upgrades with these new server processors is now supporting DDR5-5600 memory compared to DDR5-4800 with Sapphire Rapids and also the memory frequency limit with AMD's EPYC Zen 4 processors. Here are some benchmarks of the flagship Xeon Platinum 8592+ when being tested with DDR5-4800 versus DDR5-5600 memory modules.

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment...

A quirk has been discovered with the AMD-powered Framework 13 inch laptop where if a user closes the laptop's lid on an already-suspended system, the system will wake up. A set of Linux kernel patches are on the way to workaround this issue...

Intel's VC Intrinsics software package that provides a set of intrinsics atop the LLVM IR instructions to represent SIMD semantics for programs targeting Intel GPUs has been updated for new hardware support...