Phoronix

While AMD has yet to launch the Radeon RX 7600 or RX 7600 series graphics cards (sans the RX 7700S), AMD's GPUOpen tooling has seen new releases today in preparation for those forthcoming RDNA3 GPUs...

After profiling and raising an issue by Google's Chrome OS engineers, there is a set of "request for comments" patches out today for the Intel Linux graphics driver that can provide 10~15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode...

Introduced one month ago in Vulkan 1.3.246 was the new VK_EXT_shader_object extension that was worked on by developers from Activision to Valve. Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz at Valve has been busy the past few weeks on getting this shader object support wired up for use by this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

It's likely been years since many of you have heard of Firewire and some readers likely never had the opportunity to use it. The Firewire interface was great back in the day and during the early period of digital video cameras, but modern versions of USB and Thunderbolt are far faster, allow longer cable distances, and numerous other advantages. While Firewire hasn't seen much activity in years and can be outpaced by USB 3.0 and beyond, there is a new Firewire subsystem maintainer for the Linux kernel and he intends to keep at it for the next six years...

Vulkan 1.3.249 is out today as the latest spec update for this industry-standard high performance graphics and compute API. Notable with Vulkan 1.3.249 is the introduction of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch...

For those making use of the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for supporting the Radeon HD 2000 series through the HD 6000 series (pre-GCN) graphics cards, Mesa 23.2 is finally ready to drop its TGSI code path for what was once the default intermediate representation (IR) used by Gallium3D drivers but in more recent years NIR has become the preferred IR format...

Linux sound subsystem maintainer and SUSE engineer Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 kernel merge window...

Dragora remains one of the few Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and is a from-scratch distribution focused on providing only free software... The last stable release of the Linux distribution was Dragora 2.2 back in 2012 while out today is Dragora 3.0 Beta 2, which itself is coming three and a half years since the prior beta...

The x86 platform driver updates for the Linux 6.4 kernel merge window have landed. This includes numerous x86 laptop driver benefits as well as other new features for the platform-drivers-x86 subsystem...

It's been one month already since the debut of GNOME 44 and out today is the first point release...

When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been pulled into the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel with ASUS Intel/AMD desktop motherboards being the big winners with these driver updates...

The Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) device driver updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.4 merge window...

There's a bit of Linux kernel code for AMD Zen 2 processors called the "spectral chicken" and a call for cleaning up that code, which was originally written by an Intel Linux engineer, has been rejected...

GCC 13.1 has been released as the first stable version of GCC 13 as this annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection...

The xf86-video-ati 22.0 driver has been released as a rare update to this X.Org DDX driver used by older pre-GCN ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards...

In addition to EXT4 seeing some performance optimizations and folio conversion for Linux 6.4, the Btrfs and Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) drivers are also seeing some nice enhancements with this next Linux kernel version...

Last year the Pop!_OS software developers at System76 introduced system76-scheduler as a Rust-written user-space daemon intended to auto-configure CFS and dynamically manage process priorities. They've added various features to improve the Linux desktop responsiveness and performance while today they rolled out system76-scheduler v2.0 as the latest iteration of this process scheduler...

The latest feature planning around Fedora 39 for releasing later this year is around ensuring your EFI System Partition (ESP) is large enough for new functionality moving forward...