Phoronix

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year...

It's not too often hearing Linus Torvalds himself raising the alarm bells over performance regressions of the Linux kernel, but that happened this evening with the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window. Torvalds' AMD Ryzen Threadripper system suddenly was suffering from much longer build times at least as a result of new code for this kernel...

While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4'2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting...

Following the Bcachefs file-system having finally been upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel, with the Linux 6.8 merge window now ticking the file-system's lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted a set of feature additions and performance optimizations to this copy-on-write (CoW) file-system...

Last year the online repair functionality for XFS began to land with the Linux 6.6 kernel. For the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel, more online repair support for the XFS file-system is now ready...

In working toward the stable release of Plasma 6.0 at the end of February, today marks the release candidate of Plasma 6.0 along with the updated Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0 that comprise the "KDE 6th Megarelease" software...

Linux 4.14 debuted at the end of 2017 with exciting features at the time like AMD Vega improvements, working on the since-failed Intel Cannonlake graphics, Zstd compression support, and more. The kernel has advanced a heck of a lot since then and Linux 6.7 recently debuted. It's now time that Linux 4.14 LTS has been declared end-of-life...

A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code...

The tooling changes around the perf subsystem have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel merge window and provide some new hardware features and other new perf profiling capabilities...

Intel engineers have released their FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q4 release, the quarterly set of updates to the FFmpeg multimedia library that they are still working to get upstreamed where appropriate but for now is a convenient home to all of their interesting FFmpeg patches from improved video acceleration for Intel graphics hardware to neural network features still being developed and other patches that aren't yet ready for inclusion into upstream FFmpeg...

Along with the Linux 6.8 power management updates, maintainer Rafael Wysocki at Intel also sent in the ACPI updates for this next kernel version. While the ACPI changes for the kernel are often just routine churn, this cycle it's bringing a new feature: device enumeration for CSI-2 and MIPI DisCo for Imaging support. This will allow MIPI cameras moving forward to be enumerated via the platform firmware on ACPI-based systems...

Coming out of Saarland University is Vcc, the Vulkan Clang Compiler. Vcc provides an "honest attempt to bring the entire C/C++ language family to Vulkan" as an interesting new compiler...

The latest notable feature addition for Mesa 24.0 worth mentioning is to NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver for providing increasingly robust Vulkan API support on this alternative to NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver...

Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections...

Arch Linux is finally going the way of Fedora and others in making Dbus-Broker its default D-Bus daemon implementation...

Thanks to Valve's open-source developers, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed experimental support for transfer queues for facilitating SDMA image copies...

System76 has opted to offer new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors in their Thelio Major desktop line-up to provide for greater performance from AI and creator workloads to all common code compilation and other tasks leveraging many CPU cores/threads. The new System76 Thelio Major powered by Zen 4 Threadripper is being shown off this week at CES 2024 in Las Vegas at AMD's booth. A review on the new Thelio Major workstation will also be forthcoming on Phoronix...

AMD makes heavy use of the LLVM compiler infrastructure by their graphics drivers and compute stack while the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has to a lesser extent supported AMD graphics targets too in the context of GPU compute / OpenMP device offloading. That AMD Radeon/Instinct support for GCC has been carried out over the years by Mentor Graphics and other stakeholders. The latest on the AMD GPU expedition for GCC is that the upcoming GCC 14 compiler will finally be supporting AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics hardware...

The HID driver updates for Linux 6.8 include some useful additions primarily for Linux gamers or those otherwise making use of modern game controllers for other input purposes...

Ahead of the planned release at the start of February, the release candidate of LibreOffice 24.2 is now available for this leading free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office predominantly on Linux systems as well as other platforms...