Phoronix

Vulkan 1.3.270 is out this morning as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual assortment of minor fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension this time around...

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification...

Since announcing AVX10 earlier this year, Intel compiler engineers have been quite busy preparing the open-source compiler toolchains like GCC and LLVM/Clang for this next iteration of Advanced Vector Extensions. On Thursday night the latest AVX10.1 work was posted for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of its upcoming feature freeze...

Recently there has been a fair amount of work done to clean-up the Intel/AMD x86 CPU microcode loading on Linux that has now been merged for Linux 6.7...

FreeBSD developers have been busy preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14 as well as making a variety of enhancements to this leading BSD operating system...

While AMD officially supports a much narrower range of more recent Radeon hardware with their official graphics drivers for Windows (and Linux - as it pertains to their Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver and AMDVLK official Vulkan driver), thanks to the open-source community around AMD's open-source driver code there are always nifty things that come about... As I wrote about earlier this year, an independent developer has been striving to bring Vulkan to the Radeon HD 6000 series. Yes, the 13 year old "Northern Islands" graphics processors...

The IOMMU changes for Linux 6.7 aren't particularly noteworthy besides adding SMMUv2 support for the Qualcomm SDM670 and SM7150 SoCs. But the IOMMU updates also take the kernel one step away from supporting Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) on AMD platforms in the near future...

Valve just announced the Steam Deck OLED as an upgraded version of their Steam Deck handheld Linux gaming device...

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion...

Cloud Hypervisor 36 has been released as this Rust-written VMM that started out as an Intel open-source project that since was folded into the Linux Foundation umbrella with support from Microsoft, Arm, and other vendors. More recently even the likes of AMD and Ampere Computing have been onboard with this cloud and security focused virtualization hypervisor...

Andrew Morton last week sent out all of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel for which there is a lot of code churn...

Since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 back in September, this open-source and independently-developed overclocking/performance utility for Linux systems has been quick to tack on new features and rolling out new versions. A release candidate for TuxClocker 1.3 was issued a few days ago with yet more AMD graphics card controls...

Mesa 23.3-rc3 was released on Wednesday night as the newest weekly release candidate ahead of the Mesa 23.3 release as this quarter's feature series for this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers...

With the MIPS CPU architecture at the end of the road in light of RISC-V and LoongArch, there isn't much going on when it comes to MIPS development for the Linux kernel. Most cycles these days just brings bug fixes and removing old/unmaintained platforms. The latest MIPS platform now being removed is AR7 with Linux 6.7...

As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward...

NetBSD 10 has been in development since late 2019 and the beta release is already a year old while now it's up to the release candidate phase with the availability of NetBSD 10-RC1...

There's been a number of patches quietly landing for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by AMD engineers in making various clean-ups and appearing to prepare for future adjustments to the driver in eventually extending the support beyond the current RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics hardware...

The Multi-Function Device (MFD) updates were sent out last week for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel for these drivers catering to heterogeneous hardware blocks...

Today marks the on-time alpha release of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" -- this encompasses the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop, KDE Frameworks 6 libraries, and KDE Gear applications...

Microsoft engineers continue working on the Mesa drivers as part of their effort for implementing various industry standard APIs atop Direct3D 12. This support can be used in cases of Windows drivers lacking for these APIs as well as being used within WSL for the graphics support while relying on D3D12 with the host environment...