Phoronix

Now that the Linux 6.5 merge window ended this past weekend, here is the usual Phoronix overview that lists all the prominent new features and changes coming for this next version.

Last month AMD Linux kernel driver patches revealed a new feature called FreeSync Panel Replay that is basically an improvement over Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for laptop displays. That code didn't make it for the recently-closed v6.5 merge window but this week AMD engineers did post a second iteration of the patches...

AMD has made available the FidelityFX SDK solution available via GPUOpen as their easy-to-integrate offering for FidelityFX technologies...

While the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window just ended days ago and there still is two months to go until that stable release, already the lead developer of the Bcachefs file-system is working to get the code merged for Linux 6.6...

As a follow-up to the news last week when I pointed out that Intel has begun working on Granite Rapids D compiler support for the GNU Compiler Collection, that code has now been merged for next year's GCC 14 release...

Libva 2.19 has been released as the newest feature update for this centralized library used by the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux and other platforms...

Ahead of the planned LibreOffice 7.6 open-source office suite in one month, LibreOffice 7.6 RC1 is available today for testing...

For months Linux hardware vendor System76 has been teasing their in-house designed and manufactured "Virgo" laptop to be built at their facility in Denver. They are hoping to develop the quietest yet most performant Linux laptop. Today they published the initial open-source design files for their custom motherboard PCB in this laptop...

As a devoted Thunderbird mail client user for the past nearly twenty years since its first release, I'm elated today by the release of Thunderbird 115...

While GIMP 3.0 stable likely not set to debut in 2023 but rather at least release candidates are expected, Canonical is looking at shipping a GIMP 3.0 snapshot in Ubuntu 23.10 in hopes of GIMP 3.0 stable by the time of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or at least a near final v3.0 state...

With the ASUS ROG Ally being the first device powered by AMD's new Z1 Extreme SoC with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics, it's been very interesting to see its performance advantages over the Steam Deck. But beyond its potential for use in gaming handhelds, it's quite fascinating to see how powerful the Z1 Extreme actually is when removing power restrictions on this SoC. In this article is a wide range of CPU benchmarks putting the Z1 Extreme up against the new Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC as well as prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U for reference. When adjusting the ACPI Platform Profile configuration, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme proves to be very robust from a low-power SoC delivering good battery performance up through pulling 50+ Watts while outperforming the 7840U.

This shouldn't be particularly surprising for those closely tracking release cycles and the Linux kernel release cadence, but now it's official: Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship with the Linux 6.5 kernel...

Google engineers have published early code around "Device Memory TCP" (a.k.a. Devmem TCP) as a proposal for transferring data to/from device memory efficiently by avoiding the need to copy the data to a host memory buffer...

GRUB 2.12 had been talked about for a mid-2022 release while one year later we are finally greeted by the first release candidate for this next major open-source bootloader release...

Yesterday Oracle published an interesting announcement and doubled down on their intentions of keeping Oracle Linux compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux following Red Hat's controversial announcement last month. Today is another very interesting response to Red Hat's recent shift, this time from the SUSE Linux folks...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat and the lead developer behind the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has released Fwupd 1.9.3 as the newest feature update to this open-source solution for carrying out system and peripheral firmware updates on Linux...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" supports native hardware ray-tracing with RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards where it's matured quite nicely over the past number of months. With the upcoming Mesa 23.2, RADV RT support is enabled by default for all supported GPUs. RADV also has emulated ray-tracing support for older generations of AMD GPUs and as of today it's finally hit a 100% pass rate...

Earlier this month I provided some initial GeForce RTX 4060 vs. Radeon RX 7600 Linux gaming benchmarks for this new sub-$300 graphics card. For those considering this latest Ada Lovelace graphics card for 3D rendering or compute purposes, here are some benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 4060 on that front by looking at the generational performance of the x060 series graphics cards from the RTX 4060 back to the GTX 1060.

The AMD Compressonator open-source tool suite that is under the GPUOpen umbrella has now added AVX-512 support alongside other enhancements in its v4.4 update...

Following the stunning decision last month by IBM that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, AlmaLinux quickly came out working on a path forward and Rocky Linux also shared some ideas how they may continue providing a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. We've been waiting for Oracle to comment on their plans for the RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux distribution and today they finally issued a statement...