Phoronix

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations...

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there's been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February...

A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine's Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement...

The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver...

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more...

With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here's a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.

As noted a few weeks back, NVIDIA is working to add OpenACC support to the upstream LLVM Clang compiler for this parallel computing standard. Today that work began landing in LLVM/Clang's development codebase...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa has added support for the protected memory feature available with Vulkan 1.1+...

An initial set of drm-misc-next changes has been sent out today to DRM-Next of the very first feature patches to begin queuing until the Linux 6.8 merge window opens up around the start of the new year...

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven't yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There's also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors...

For those Ubuntu Linux users enjoying the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for having the very latest kernel stable point releases or being able to test daily Git kernel builds with ease or weekly RCs, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA returned this week after a month of downtime...

Earlier this week Intel compiler engineers posted patches enabling Intel APX NDD support for the GCC compiler as the "New Data Destination" feature of the Advanced Performance Extensions. Those engineers are ending out their week by posting patches for enabling APX PPX for GCC, the new Push-Pop Acceleration of this forthcoming ISA addition...

Valve has released SteamOS 3.5.5 to its stable channel for Steam Deck users that brings Steam Deck OLED device support, HDR display settings if supported by the external display, the default color rendering for Steam Deck LCD now emulates the sRGB color gamut, and many other changes...

Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available, Noctua recently introduced the new NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 heatsinks. In addition to working with the Threadripper 7000 series, these CPUs fit as well for Socket SP6 introduced with the new AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" processors. Here is a look at the cooling performance of these new Noctua TR5-SP6 heatsinks on AMD EPYC.

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has announced they've developed open-source Linux kernel driver support for the H.264 video encoder found with Allwinner V3, V3s, and S3 SoCs...

As was expected but now made official: this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel is Linux 6.6...

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands...

Intel has released OpenVINO 2023.2 as the newest version of their open-source toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues in its never-ending quest for maximizing deep learning performance and efficiency while continuing to expand in its model support and features...

Going back to May 2022, AMD Linux graphics driver engineers were working on AMDGPU driver patches to enable a new Light System DMA "LSDMA" IP block. Since then we haven't heard much about LSDMA until some new patches surfaced yesterday for optionally enabling the LSDMA ring mode for the AMDGPU kernel driver...