Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 5 min 8 sec ago
Intel's Open-Source Contributions & Upstream Performance Optimizations Top 2023
After looking earlier today at the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source stories of 2023, here's a look at the other side of the table with the most popular Intel content on Phoronix for the past year with my daily open-source and Linux focused coverage...
Wayland Enjoyed Many Successes In 2023
The Wayland ecosystem had a phenomenal year from much better NVIDIA proprietary driver support, Firefox ending out the year shipping with Wayland support enabled by default, KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland following many improvements on the KDE side, the Wine Wayland driver upstreamed in its initial form, XWayland continuing to be enhanced, and a lot of other software from desktop environments to apps continuing to embrace Wayland...
AMD CPU Use By Linux Gamers At ~70%, AMD openSIL, & AMD Laptops Topped 2023
As part of the various end-of-year Phoronix articles, here's a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news stories and reviews of 2023...
SPI-NOR Multi-Due Erase Support Ready For Linux 6.8
While the Linux 6.8 merge window isn't opening for another week, the Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have already been mailed in to Linus Torvalds for this next merge window...
Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 & Other Scarlett Audio Mixers To Be Supported By Linux 6.8
Picked up this week by the Linux sound subsystem's "next" development branch is a number of additions to the Scarlett USB audio mixer driver for supporting this audio hardware under Linux...
Intel Meteor Lake, Emerald Rapids & Other Popular Topics For December
Over the course of 2023 on Phoronix were more than 2,780 original news articles and more than 180 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles. In the month of December alone were 211 original news articles and 20 featured articles/reviews. Here's a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source crowd over the final month of 2023...
Linux 6.7-rc8 Released: A Light Holiday Release With A Couple Fixes
For this New Year's Eve the decision was made to release Linux 6.7-rc8 to allow for an extra week of testing -- and pushing back the Linux 6.8 merge window further past the holidays -- rather than releasing Linux 6.7 stable today. As such, Linux 6.7-rc8 is out for a final week of testing this new kernel...
OpenCV 4.9 Brings DNN Module Enhancements, Orbbec Gemini 2 Camera Support
OpenCV 4.9 released on Friday as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library...
GNU Boot Drops Some Motherboards & CPU Code After Discovering Non-Free Bits
The GNU Boot project has been in the works as a Coreboot/Libreboot fork focused on "freedom respecting boot firmware" that is free from closed-source and proprietary components. But in working towards its inaugural v0.1 release, they discovered that they had inadvertently been shipping some non-free software around AMD CPU microcode updates and some motherboard ports with non-open-source code...
AMD Ends Out 2023 Still Working To Get The Rest Of SEV-SNP Upstream In Linux
This New Year's weekend brought the latest AMD patches working on plumbing the mainline Linux kernel with the hypervisor support around AMD Secure Nested Paging (SNP) as part of their Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). SEV-SNP has been supported since EPYC 7003 series and while some elements of the support have been upstreamed for securing VMs, some bits remain...
Alacritty 0.13 Released For This OpenGL-Powered Terminal Emulator
With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator...
Rav1e 0.7.0 Released For Xiph.Org's Latest Rust-Based AV1 Encoding
The Xiph.Org project Rav1e to provide the fastest and safest AV1 encoder by leveraging the Rust programming language is ending out 2023 with a new feature release...
Freedreno Now Supports The Qualcomm Adreno 644 GPU
Igalia's Danylo Piliaiev has contributed support to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in Mesa 24.0 for supporting the Qualcomm Adreno 644 graphics...
ScummVM 2.8 Gets More Games Running
ScummVM 2.8 is out this New Year's weekend to end out 2023 by getting more games running on this open-source software that started out re-implementing LucasArts adventure games and other game titles...
RAO-INT Instructions Will No Longer Premiere With Intel Grand Ridge
Added last year to the open-source compilers were Intel RAO-INT instructions for upcoming Intel CPUs. RAO-INT as new atomic ADD / AND / OR / XOR instructions were to debut with Intel's Grand Ridge SoC but now that is apparently no longer the case...
Fedora 40 Looks To Provide Optimized x86_64 Binaries For Different HWCAPs
In addition to Ubuntu exploring the possibility of x86_64-v3 builds/packages, a proposal has been raised for Fedora Linux with its current Fedora 40 cycle to provide the ability to offer optimized x86_64 (AMD64) binaries based upon the CPU's x86_64 micro-architecture feature level...
Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Now Exposes Cooperative Matrix Support
Merged on Friday for Mesa 24.0-devel in Q1 is support for the VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix extension with Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver...
LuxCoreRender 2.8 Alpha Released With Initial Blender 4.x Integration
LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series...
Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 Focal Brings PinePhone Images, Initial Snap Support
Ubuntu Touch OTA-3 Focal is out today as the UBport's latest release of this Ubuntu mobile adaptation for smartphones and tablets. This is the third release to be based on their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base, which is quite aging at this point but still better off than their earlier 16.04 LTS foundation...
Gentoo Ends Out 2023 By Offering Up Binary Packages For Direct Installation
The Gentoo Linux project's Portage package manager has long supported the ability to deal with binary packages while moving forward they are finally leveraging that to offer binary packages for download and direct installation...
