Phoronix

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...

Among the many interesting changes that landed the past two weeks for the Linux 6.5 merge window, the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates as a whole standout for bringing numerous desktop motherboards and other devices to now enjoy working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

Besides Bcachefs missing out on Linux 6.5, another patch series that didn't get buttoned up in time for the v6.5 merge window was AMD's work on radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation between WiFi 6/6e/7 hardware and AMD's newest SoCs with RDNA3 graphics...

About a year ago Ubunty changed its default compression level for its initramfs handling down to Zstd level one to deal with slow initramfs creation times on low-end systems / development boards. But since then that has resulted in larger initramfs sizes and yielding other bugs like more quickly filling up the /boot partition on Ubuntu systems. Thus the developers have gone back to the drawing board and are trying to figure out a path forward for better initramfs handling that works well for low-end single board computers while also maximizing space savings and working out well for all Ubuntu use-cases...

While Google shutdown their Stadia game streaming service, with updated firmware there is Bluetooth (BLE) support for the controller as well as USB wired connectivity for those wishing to continue using this gaming controller. Google engineers have also been working on a new Linux driver for enabling force feedback "rumble" support with this controller...

While Intel's Linux engineers were very timely in enabling much of the Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" support for the upstream Linux kernel well ahead of the processor launch at the beginning of the year, one patch series that has continued on post-launch has been working to get the new C0.x idle states supported...

Linus Torvalds just declared the first release candidate of Linux 6.5 that also marks the end of new feature code being introduced for this cycle...

GIMP 2.99.16 is out this Sunday as the GIMP 3.0 release candidate finally nears...

The Hangover open-source project has been working on supporting Windows apps and games on other CPU architectures like AArch64 running Linux. RISC-V and POWER9 are other CPU architectures of interest for enabling Hangover support. Besides leveraging the Wine software, Hangover to date has relied on the QEMU emulator as part of the implementation while now they have begun integrating FEX support too...