Phoronix

The review embargo has now expired on the Framework Laptop 16, the latest innovative and upgradeable laptop from this company that has made quite a name for itself with modular and user-upgradeable laptop designs for both AMD and Intel. The new Framework Laptop 16 offers even more customizability around the keyboard/touchpad and other options including over using a Radeon RX 7700S graphics module and more. Besides the immense customizability options and upgrades available with the Framework Laptop 16, the new model employs the AMD Ryzen 7040HS processor for even greater performance over the AMD Ryzen 7040U found with the latest Framework 13 model.

Over the weekend I shared some benchmarks showing some nice performance gains with Linux 6.7 over the 6.6 kernel when running on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X HEDT processor within the new System76 Thelio. So now you may be wondering about the performance with the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel... Here are some early tests there...

While Intel's Sierra Forest as their first all-E-core Xeon processor with up to 288 cores per socket isn't launching until around the middle of this calendar year, Intel Linux engineers already sent out their first kernel patch in beginning to target its successor: Clearwater Forest...

The Gentoo Linux project published a 2023 retrospective on Monday that outlines their ongoing high level of development, gaining three new developers over the past calendar year, and various initiatives embarked on by the developers...

Today marks the first Mozilla Firefox feature release of 2024 with quite a number of new features to showcase in the newly-published Firefox 122...

Valve has rolled out Proton 8.0-5 as the newest version of their Wine downstream for powering Steam Play to enjoy mass amounts of Windows games to run rather well on Linux...

For those wanting to use an open-source Coreboot-based firmware on your desktop with modern hardware, a rare and leading option is 3mdeb's Coreboot-based "Dasharo" firmware on select MSI Z690/Z790 motherboards...

A change merged today for the Linux 6.8 kernel intentionally following yesterday's Linux 6.8-rc1 is a move to enable the "-Wstringop-overflow" compiler option by default...

As part of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series launch RTX Remix was announced for helping game modders remaster older game titles for RTX/ray-tracing. RTX Remix 0.1 debuted last April as the initial version of their software to provide path-tracing support for classic games. Out today is the latest work for helping to remaster classic games with the debut of RTX Remix 0.4...

FreeBSD developers are currently weighing the benefits and costs of allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the FreeBSD base system...

Fedora Linux already ships an iotop-c package for this C alternative the the common iotop program for reporting I/O metrics under Linux, but with the upcoming Fedora 40 release it's looking at having iotop-c replace the original iotop...

Released earlier this month was Linux Mint 21.3 and out-of-the-box it continues to run on the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel... Quite old at this point and was the Ubuntu 22.04 default for which Linunx Mint 21 is based. For those unable to boot Linux Mint 21.3 due to running on newer AMD/Intel hardware or other platform compatibility issues, the Linux Mint 21.3 EDGE ISOs are now published that utilize Linux 6.5 by default...

While back in December the GNOME dynamic triple buffering was self-proclaimed to be "ready to merge", so far that hasn't happened yet. With the GNOME 46 feature freeze scheduled for 10 February, it remains to be seen if this long-worked-on dynamic triple/double buffering will be ready in time for this six month release. In any event, this past week saw a new optimization queued for this code...

Fedora 40 is looking at bpfman for serving as the default eBPF program manager to simplify the deployment and administration of said eBPF programs...

More than one week ago was the main Bcachefs feature pull for Linux 6.8 that included further enhancing the performance and other features of this new file-system merged back in Linux 6.7. Yesterday, just prior to the Linux 6.8-rc1 release, a secondary set of Bcachefs updates were merged for this next kernel version...

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds lost Internet and electricity amid winter storms last weekend and was without them for most of this week, he's still managed to deliver an on-time Linux 6.8-rc1 release following the two week merge window...

When it comes to the Linux kernel's "crypto" subsystem for various cryptographic and compression algorithms and various hardware drivers, the new additions for Linux 6.8 are particularly interesting on the Intel side...

Sent in last week were all of the media driver updates for Linux 6.8. Arguably most notable is the introduction of the StarFive Camera Subsystem driver as a new image sensor processor driver initially being treated as a staging driver...

Following the work on enhancing the scalability of the MQ-Deadline I/O scheduler, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has applied similar scalability improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler...

Along with the USB/Thunderbolt changes for Linux 6.8, Greg Kroah-Hartman also submitted the char/misc changes during the back-half of the week for this new kernel version...