Phoronix

Now that Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" shipped and the initial Linux support is all aligned, recently there has been an uptick in activity around Emerald Rapids and even Granite Rapids as its successor along with the Sierra Forest support. On the EMR front, the latest Linux driver activity is extending the In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for additional testing capabilities...

An optimization to Mesa's shader database cache eviction handling has been merged to Mesa 23.1 with a focus on benefiting Steam's shader pre-caching...

During the course of this month on Phoronix were 224 original news articles pertaining to Linux / open-source / hardware and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews...

One of the new features introduced with Linux 6.2 is Call Depth Tracking and it can help extend the useful service life of Intel Skylake through Coffeelake era processors in providing better performance than is otherwise found out-of-the-box on Linux.

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development...

While JPEG-XL image support has been available opt-in within Firefox Nightly builds for testing, Mozilla has finally weighed in on the JPEG-XL debate and has come out "neutral" on the matter for this modern raster image file format...

A new patch series published this week by AMD engineers is preparing Linux kernel support for Secure TSC, a feature found with SEV-SNP enabled processors since the EPYC 7003 "Milan" series...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver that was started originally as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics continues flourishing. A number of MSM driver additions -- including new Qualcomm platform support -- is ready to go with the upcoming Linux 6.3 kernel...

AMDVLK 2023.Q1.1 is out today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver for 2023. Given the month and a half since the prior update, this AMDVLK update is rather significant with all of its changes...

As a new hardware feature for Intel IoT and server platforms not previously announced at large, Intel Timed I/O is being worked on in a new open-source Linux kernel driver...

A set of 24 Linux kernel patches today wire up the basic ACPI infrastructure support for the RISC-V processor architecture...

The Khronos Group with LunarG has now published the Vulkan SDK 1.3.239 release that is the first version of the software development kit with the Vulkan Video extensions now present...

With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.

Code merged last week to Mesa 23.1 by AMD ensures that a linear copy buffer is made on the display/scanout GPU when dealing with EGL contexts under Wayland or X11. This follows an optimization made last year to Mesa's GLX code within X.Org environments for enhancing the PRIME/multi-GPU support...

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging Linux 6.2-rc6 is a late "fix" for the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) code to avoid possible situations of undefined behavior with difficult to debug issues where a modern Linux host with SEV-SNP may try booting a Linux virtual machine with an outdated kernel...

Last week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on Fedora 38 shipping with its planned bleeding-edge compiler toolchain, most notably including the upcoming GCC 13 compiler...

Labwc that has been in development for a few years as a window-stacking Wayland compositor issued its latest release this weekend...

Unvanquished 0.54 was released overnight as the latest update across the array of many releases going back a decade for this open-source first person shooter game. With Unvanquished 0.54 there continues to be enhancements to its renderer, the project is now providing ARM binaries on Linux to complement their x86/x86_64 builds, user-interface improvements, and gameplay enhancements...

The long elusive GIMP 3.0 release that overhauls the UI and ports from GTK2 to GTK3 along with a wealth of other changes after being talked about for a decade could finally see its stable release this year...

Linus Torvalds just released the sixth weekly RC of Linux 6.2 and it's coming in unusually light...