Phoronix

Intel open-source engineers have readied their first batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" changes for DRM-Next of material they are preparing for introduction with the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle later this year...

Cemu is a popular emulator for the Nintendo Wii U that can successfully run many games as well as homebrew titles. Cemu started off with just Windows support but then at the beginning of the year laid out plans to go open-source and provide Linux support. They've pulled that off and the code is now out there in a public GitHub repository...

The current Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa supports graphics hardware going back to the "Gen7" graphics found with Haswell. However, Intel open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are preparing to separate the old Haswell (Gen7) and Broadwell (Gen8) graphics into a separate Mesa driver so they can better focus on improving their modern Vulkan driver that would then be limited to Skylake Gen9 graphics and newer...

The X.Org project "xisxwayland" is out with a new version of this simple program that can be easily called by shell scripts and other simple uses for checking to see whether the running X.Org Server is a genuine X11 server or more commonly these days an XWayland server running within a Wayland environment...

For speeding up the actual Mesa continuous integration (CI) process itself with frequently building new revisions of Mesa3D, their CI infrastructure is beginning to make use of the Mold linker as a high performance alternative to the GNU Gold and LLVM LLD linkers. This is yielding a "substantial" performance improvement in tests for being able to turnaround CI jobs faster and in turn allowing Mesa developers to be more efficient...

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb last year worked on Fwupd support for FreeBSD so system firmware updates can be more easily handled on that popular BSD operating system and leveraging the Fwupd/LVFS infrastructure that's been happening for years in the Linux space. Their most recent target is now DragonFlyBSD for handling of UEFI firmware updates with Fwupd...

One of the great things about Jason Ekstrand having joined Collabora at the start of the year is that the former Intel graphics engineer, who was on the team that created their original Vulkan driver, can now work on whatever open-source driver code he wishes. Among other upstream Mesa work, he's recently been contributing to the new "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan driver and also the RADV driver too...

Back in May there was a patch series by Google engineers working on encrypted hibernation support for Linux that would be protected by the platform hardware itself like with a TPM module as well as user authentication by a password or other means. Sent out today is a second revision to that Linux encrypted hibernation support...

As I've written about the past several weeks, AMD engineers have been preparing a Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver for Linux. The AMD Platform Management Framework for future hardware appears similar to Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) and designed to enhance the thermal/power performance of future platforms...

CodeWeavers today announced the availability of their Wine-based CrossOver 22 software for enjoying Windows applications and games atop Linux, ChromeOS, and macOS...

Webmin as a popular, open-source web-based server administration/management software package that is a popular alternative to the likes of cPanel and Plesk is out with its big "v2.0" release...

Earlier this year was the surprise announcement of Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa. That driver has since been mainlined in Mesa and the Imagination developers continue working on improving their Vulkan API coverage. Simultaneously they have been working on a proper, upstream-friendly open-source DRM/KMS kernel driver and that code now is far enough along that it's been sent out for initial review...

Sound Open Fimware is already four years old as what started out as Intel pushing for more open firmware around audio DSPs. Since then we've seen Mediatek begin to support "SOF" as well as some AMD hardware supporting Sound Open Firmwar. Out today is SOF 2.2.1 as the latest from this open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella...

Mozilla is ready to ship Firefox 104.0 this morning as the latest incremental improvement to this open-source, cross-platform web browser...

Last month Dell announced their new Alder Lake powered XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop was certified by Canonical for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. At the time though it was still shipping to customers with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now Dell has moved to preloading Ubuntu 22.04 LTS directly from the factory...

Flatpak 1.14 has been released as the newest feature release for this leading open-source solution for sandboxing and distribution of Linux applications...

Earlier this summer was the patch series for GNOME's Mutter to make use of the Linux DRM/KMS "max BPC" property for the drivers exposing the maximum bits per color supported. That code has now been merged in time for next month's GNOME 43 release and in turn will help deal with some scenarios where users may encounter screen flickering, brief blackouts, and other problems related to available monitor bandwidth...

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on the Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali driver and has been spending nearly two years now involved with the Asahi Linux crew working on reverse-engineered Apple M1/M2 graphics support has shared a new status update...

With this weekend having seen more Zink refactoring code land and Zink being faster than RadeonSI at least for some operations, it was time to fire up some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. From the newest Mesa code this weekend after the latest Zink patches were merged, here is a look at how the Zink performance is compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's native OpenGL support. All of the testing was done using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC...