Phoronix

There is two weeks to go until the Linux 6.3 stable kernel is released, which could drag out to three weeks if last minute issues come about in the kernel. But given all the material queuing via the many "-next" code branches, we already have a good idea for many of the features in store for Linux 6.4...

Landing today in Mesa 23.2-devel is support for big.LITTLE CPU detection or more broadly hybrid CPU core detection where little cores (e.g. E cores) are defined as having less than 50% the capacity of the largest CPU core on the system. This is done since Mesa's OpenGL threading is now being disabled for small hybrid processors...

Mesa 23.1 enables RadeonSI Rusticl support while for next quarter's Mesa 23.2, which just started development, there is already a big ticket item for Rusticl: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle is being extended to support new Ambient Color Sensor "ACS" functionality...

The much anticipated Fedora 38 is cleared for releasing on Tuesday. There are no delays with the Fedora 38 cycle and in fact hitting their "early target date" for shipping on 18 April...

Open-source fans, rejoice, the most exciting thing I have read all week or perhaps the month: "AMD is committed to open-source software and is now expanding into the various firmware domains with the re-architecture of its x86 AGESA FW stack - designed with UEFI as the host firmware that prevented scaling, to other host firmware solutions such as coreboot, oreboot, FortiBIOS, Project Mu and others. A newer, open architecture that potentially allows for reduced attack surface, and perceivably infinite scalability is now available as a Proof-of-Concept, within the open-source community for evaluation, called the AMD openSIL – Open-Source Silicon Initialization Library."..

As part of Intel's ongoing Linux support preparations for next year's Sierra Forest processors that will feature up to 144 Xeon E cores per socket, the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver support is set to be added for the upcoming Linux 6.4 kernel cycle...

Libreboot is the downstream of Coreboot focused on having fully open-source / free software replacements to proprietary BIOS/firmware on x86 and ARM systems. Out today is Libreboot 20230413 as the latest step forward for the project...

The Mesa 23.1 graphics driver code is now branched that marks an end to this quarter's feature development. Mesa 23.2-devel is now open on Git main in beginning work towards the Q3'2023 open-source user-space graphics driver stack feature release...

As the "world's first pro chiplet GPU", AMD today is announcing the Radeon PRO W7000 series as their first RDNA3-based professional offerings.

Canonical announced today that their kernel livepatching service will now be available for their hardware enablement "HWE" kernels on Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases...

Days after releasing the Intel Media Driver 2023Q1, Intel's software engineers have now released oneVPL 2023Q1 as the updated quarterly release to this video processing library that is part of Intel's open-source oneAPI toolkit...

For those with a Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1/convertible laptop, a tablet mode switch driver is set to be merged for Linux 6.4 to properly handle the tablet mode switching support for these devices while running the mainline Linux kernel...

Servo as the browser engine started at Mozilla but now developed as a Linux Foundation project has been maintaining two separate layout engines and moving forward they hope to be able to focus on the newer "Layout 2020" engine and fill in its missing gaps...

While we are still waiting for the Intel Xe kernel driver to be upstreamed as the modern alternative to the long-used i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, upstream Mesa Git is nearly ready in supporting the Xe kernel driver and its new/changed interfaces...

With Linux 6.3 there is the new AMD P-State EPP driver code for supporting the ACPI Energy Performance Preference (EPP) to further enhance the power efficiency and performance of modern AMD systems on Linux. Last week I ran some benchmarks of AMD EPYC with the new AMD P-State EPP mode while in today's article is a look at the laptop impact with Ryzen Mobile when comparing ACPI CPUFreq, the existing AMD P-State driver, and the new AMD P-State EPP mode and its multiple different preferences.

In addition to releasing the GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card today (unfortunately, no launch day Linux review, still waiting on hardware...), NVIDIA has released as open-source the RTX Remix software for helping to add path tracing support to classic games...

Intel Foundry Services (IFS) has racked up a big win today with Arm over enabling chip designers to make use of Intel's upcoming 18A process for low-power Arm SoCs...

If Mesa 23.1 couldn't get anymore exciting with RADV GPL support enabled by default, more RDNA3 optimizations, continued Zink optimizations, more Intel DG2/Alchemist enhancements, and a load of other features... Support for RadeonSI with the Rusticl Rust-written OpenCL driver has been merged!..

The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts, which is used by at least a once popular Intel Atom powered Android tablet from a decade prior...