Phoronix

Googler Rob Clark on Sunday sent out the set of MSM DRM patches prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. The MSM DRM driver is the kernel component for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics that goes along with the Freedreno Gallium3D and TURNIP Vulkan drivers in Mesa for having a nice Qualcomm Linux graphics stack...

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming...

QEMU 8.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

The AGX Gallium3D driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew for providing reverse-engineered OpenGL / GLES support on Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware is now formally compliant with OpenGL ES 3.1...

Following the news last week of Firefox outperforming Chrome in SunSpider, a Phoronix reader pointed out Mercury that is an open-source web browser claiming to be the "fastest Firefox fork" and making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AES instructions along with compiler features like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO). The project advertises as being 8-20% faster than upstream Firefox. Curious I ran a couple benchmarks on my end of this Firefox fork.

Continuing to support x86 32-bit processors with the mainline Linux kernel continues to be a maintenance burden and uncovering ugly bits of code that are seldom touched. The latest work is on fixing up the 32-bit early microcode loading code so that it's more robust and actually correct...

While we are waiting on NVIDIA to roll out a beta of their next post-R535 Linux driver release stream, available today is the NVIDIA 535.104.05 Linux driver as their latest in this production driver branch...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has just released Fwupd 1.9.4 as the newest version of thus open-source software that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making it easy to deploy new firmware/BIOS updates for systems and countless peripherals under Linux...

GNOME's Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details...

One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2...

Intel is well regarded for their vast open-source contributions from being a major contributor to the Linux kernel and other areas like Mesa, GCC/glibc, and other key open-source projects to various niche projects like ConnMan and other smaller software projects. Debuting a few months ago as one of the newest open-source Intel projects catching us by surprise was Intel One Mono as a font designed for developers. Today brings a new version of that font...

New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders...

Git 2.42 is out today as the newest feature update for this dominant open-source distributed revision control system...

In recent days a number of feature patches were queued in HID-next to provide new driver features and hardware support within the Human Interface Device subsystem...

The amdfwtool utility living within the Coreboot repository for dealing with AMD platform firmware files has now added support for EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors...

On Friday AMD sent out another pull request of AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. With the Linux 6.5 release due out likely in one week and the cut-off having passed for new "feature" code for DRM-Next, this latest AMDGPU pull request was centered around bug-fixes but also with a few minor additions...

For those that have been eyeing an AMD Ryzen 7 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop for Linux use, over the coming weeks ahead there will be benchmarks and a review on the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop. With this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 4 mobile processor clocking up to 5.1GHz, 64GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and 2.8K OLED display it should be a real treat if the Linux support is all in good shape...

Melissa Wen with consulting firm Igalia continues working with AMD and Valve engineers on supporting AMD driver-specific color management properties for Linux to benefit the Steam Deck but ultimately to benefit all AMD Linux users as well...

LibreOffice 7.6 is now available as the latest major release to this leading open-source office suite that is widely used on the Linux desktop and elsewhere...

The new nvidia-drm-kmod is a FreeBSD port of Linux's nvidia-drm.ko open-source kernel module...