Phoronix

While it's been three years now since Ampere Altra Q80 was first introduced and two years since first testing the 128-core Ampere Altra Max, this ARM server platform has aged rather well with more robust hardware platforms coming to market with better firmware, the AArch64 Linux/open-source software ecosystem as a whole improving a lot during this time and more open-source projects receiving ARM optimizations, and other improvements made. While we're eagerly awaiting to see AmpereOne hardware, here is a look at how Ampere Altra Max M128-30 is standing up against current AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo server CPUs along with Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors in raw performance and power efficiency.

A patch merged this weekend for Mesa 24.0-devel is helping the performance of the open-source NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs but the performance remains well short still of the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack...

WayVNC v0.8 is working its way toward release as a VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC continues to make it quite easy to have VNC support for Wayland desktops employing wlroots and this next release brings even more features...

Storage company Kioxia that was spun off from Toshiba several years ago has donated a software development kit (SDK) to the Linux Foundation for establishing the Software-Enabled Flash SDK. This is for opening new doors and innovative uses around flash memory...

Since earlier this year AMD has been working on Linux support for WBRF for mitigating WiFi radio frequency interference (RFI) with their latest Ryzen 7000 and forthcoming Ryzen 8000 series mobile processors. That work looks like it will be ready to land in Linux 6.8...

Following a bumpy weekend due to the EXT4 data corruption bug, Linux 6.6.6 is out with just a sole change for dealing with another headache: WiFi regressions...

Following Debian 12.3 being delayed due to an EXT4 data corruption bug briefly appearing in released Linux 6.1 LTS releases, Debian 12.3 has been replaced by Debian 12.4 and comes with dozens of bug fixes...

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 6.7 kernel. He's happy with how things have been pacing this stage of the cycle, particularly as he's been battling travels and a head cold this week...

Unvanquished has been a promising open-source first person shooter game in development for over a decade. It started out putting monthly alpha releases and quite a brisk development pace but in recent years the releases have been much less frequent. This year started out with Unvanquished 0.54 being released and in now approaching the end of the year is seeing a new point release...

Linux Mint 21.3 beta is now available for testing as this latest Ubuntu-based, desktop-focused Linux distribution...

Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there's the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels -- most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12...

Lubuntu as the Ubuntu Linux spin featuring the lightweight LXQt desktop has shared some of their plans for the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS release. As part of this release due out in April they are aiming to have an optional Wayland session in place although they don't expect to make it the default until Lubuntu 24.10...

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month's update...

Earlier Phoronix reporting on the "Valve Galileo" as a new Steam Deck device proved accurate and that is the new Steam Deck OLED gaming console. Further improving the upstream Linux kernel support is a set of patches to further refine the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) support for this new platform...

Following last week's initial set of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 6.8, another weekly pull request was submitted on Friday to DRM-Next of further changes...

In addition to Intel preparing to merge their new Xe kernel graphics driver into the mainline kernel potentially for Linux 6.8, their existing open-source Intel kernel graphics driver code continues to be improved upon and receiving new features...

With the recent €1M in funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers remain quite busy working on improving the accessibility and security of the GNOME desktop...

It's a Christmas season of bug fixing in the KDE world as following the late November Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 they've shifted from feature work to fixes and with the new test release has received an influx of bug reports...

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M...

The release process has begun for releasing Wine 9.0 as stable early next year...