Phoronix

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward...

Back in Linux 6.4 there were Intel HD audio additions for Lunar Lake processors, ACE2.x integration with Lunar Lake has also been worked on as part of the SoundWire support, and also early preparations on the Sound Open Firmware side. With Linux 6.6 there are more audio bits coming together for Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake processors...

For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing...

With KDE Plasma 6 development going well and a beta potentially in a few months, the KDE Neon Linux distribution crew has created a new archive with the latest Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 components to help developers and enthusiasts in testing out this leading-edge open-source desktop code...

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes...

The past several weeks at Phoronix has been very exciting with benchmarking AMD EPYC Genoa-X processors (along with Bergamo) and the incredible uplift delivered by these latest AMD server processors. But for those not yet having the opportunity to test the new EPYC Genoa-X processors locally, those wishing to evaluate the Genoa-X capabilities in the public cloud prior to making an investment in these high-end server processors with 3D V-Cache, or those simply preferring the ease of cloud infrastructure, Azure's new HBv4 series provide an excellent route for leveraging AMD Genoa-X compute capabilities in the cloud. Here are benchmarks of the new Azure HBv4 powered by EPYC Genoa-X compared to prior Azure HPC VMs. The Azure HBv4 performance is outstanding with incredible generational uplift and leading value among Microsoft's HPC-focused VMs.

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance...

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase...

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support...

It's been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops...

An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle...

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks...

The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I've been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum...

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake...

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates...

LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today's RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office...

Clément Lefèbvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they'll be releasing an "EDGE" ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware...

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API...