Phoronix

FLAC 1.4 was released on Friday as the "Free Lossless Audio Codec" that is known for its great, no-cost lossless compression for digital audio...

Last month Intel began landing oneVPL support within FFmpeg as their video processing and acceleration library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit. The oneVPL Video Processing Library supports CPU-based execution as well as native Intel GPU acceleration for their latest Gen12/Xe hardware with a focus on Arc Graphics / DG2 hardware, targeting the Intel Media SDK for their older GPUs, and can be adapted for other possible back-ends...

Canonical used to host a stellar in-person event each Ubuntu Linux development cycle with the Ubuntu Developer Summit. That was over a decade ago and then it became largely a virtual event and then faded away in favor of Canonical's internal road-map planning and other developer sprints among their employees. Coming up in November in Prague is the return of an in-person official event with the Ubuntu Summit...

The Debian project today released Debian 11.5 and Debian 10.3 as the newest versions of their free GNU/Linux operating system...

AMD engineers are working to better optimize the Linux kernel's scheduler for split-LLC (last level cache) processor designs, namely to benefit their EPYC server processors...

Sent out as a "request for comments" on Friday night was a new patch series out of Intel introducing the notion of "classes of tasks" for the Linux kernel so that the scheduler can make better decisions on hybrid processors like with Intel's Alder Lake processors and upcoming Raptor Lake. This also provides a more complete implementation of Intel Thread Director for Linux and may also be used as the basis for instruction set differences between the performance and efficient cores...

Intel engineers have submitted another batch of "i915" kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.1 that include updated GuC firmware version handling, more DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics work, and also more Meteor Lake "MTL" enablement for that successor to Raptor Lake...

Fedora Linux releases whether they be development/beta snapshots or the stable releases are known for slipping all too often. Fedora will often delay due to blocker bugs as they aim to deliver a bleeding-edge yet reliable Linux distribution and thus a week or two delay here and there isn't uncommon at all. While they have been delivering more timely releases than in the past with their notorious delays, for Fedora Linux 37 Beta they have delivered on the feat of an on-time release...

KDE Plasma 5.26 is due for release on 11 October while the Plasma 5.26 beta is planned for next week. As such the developers involved have been quite busy with finishing touches ahead of the beta...

Following the news from this summer of Zstd compression being eyed for use within LLVM, the code has begun being merged to allow for Zstd-compressed ELF debug sections as an alternative to the long-used Zlib...

Wine 7.17 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release but due to the US Labor Day this past week seems to be a driving factor in this update coming in rather small...

Over the past year AMD engineers have been developing the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver as an alternative to the long-used ACPI CPUFreq driver to provide better performance/power efficiency with Zen 2 and newer Ryzen/EPYC processors. Today they have now introduced AMD P-State EPP as they aim to deliver better performance-per-Watt...

VMware's performance engineering team today announced a performance regression in Linux 5.19 affecting compute performance up to -70%, networking up to -30%, and storage up to -13%. But the unfortunate thing is the heavy hitting regressions are known and a side effect of the Intel Retbleed mitigation for older processors...

OpenSUSE has today made available their Leap Micro 5.3 Beta operating system as the lightweight, immutable OS intended for edge / embedded / IoT use-cases...

Last month I wrote about the work being done by Jason Ekstrand for switching RADV completely over to dynamic rendering. That work has now panned out and as of a few minutes ago the transition to "100%" dynamic rendering for RADV has landed in Mesa 22.3...

AMD has submitted an initial big batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.1 merge window...

For the past two decades Red Hat has been behind Sourceware.org for providing hosting for open-source projects like Cygwin, GNU GCC, GDB, Glibc, and many other projects. While Red Hat continues to sponsor the hosting and having their employees be involved with the Sourceware.org maintenance, etc, for ensuring a secured future they have been looking to hookup with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). The SFC has now voted in favor of accepting this long-time open-source hosting service into their umbrella...

Thanks to Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now works with the AMD/GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler...

In addition to the drm-misc-next pull from earlier in the week, another set of Direct Rendering Manager updates for the core DRM code and smaller drivers has now been submitted for DRM-Next...

In addition to Intel acquiring Linutronix as the company known for their work on the real-time (RT) kernel patches and other contributions and then back in June acquiring Codeplay Software, Intel has today made another notable software talent acquisition... Intel announced this afternoon that the team behind ArrayFire has joined the company to further their ambitious software endeavors...