Phoronix

Released on Friday was OpenJPEG 2.5 as the newest update to this open-source JPEG 2000 image library. Notable with this new release for this BSD 2-clause library is now supporting high-throughput "HTJ2K" decoding...

Released on Friday was systemd 251-rc3 as what should be the last planned release candidate for this first major feature update since last December...

It was another week of seeing lots of Plasma Wayland session fixes and improvements...

A feature of Thunderbolt seemingly not widely leveraged is allowing two distinct hosts/systems to be connected over a Thunderbolt cable that can then be used for tunneling arbitrary data packets using high-speed DMA rings. Should you find yourself using such a setup, starting with Linux 5.19+ it should open the door for being much faster when running on latest-generation Intel hardware for USB4/Thunderbolt...

Following the groundwork laid in Linux 5.18, Intel VT-x's IPI Virtualization support is set to be introduced with the Linux 5.19 kernel for supporting this new hardware capability found with Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors...

It was just last week that GCC 12.1 was released and already it's being used by the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution as of today's build...

Those using the Chromium web browser on Ubuntu by way of the Snap package, the latest build has now enabled (optional) Wayland support...

Building off last month's Ubuntu 22.04 Long-Term Support release, Canonical today has published the beta builds of the upcoming Ubuntu Core 22...

Back in early March Intel engineers posted a Linux driver for new functionality called In-Field Scan used for silicon failure testing. Barring any last minute issues, that Intel IFS driver should be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle...

Prominent Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source driver team has begun working on GFX11 support for this driver ahead of AMD RDNA3 graphics cards launching later this year...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library this morning merged AVIF muxing support for this image format based on the AV1 royalty-free video codec technology...

NetworkManager 1.38 is now available for this widely-used software on the Linux desktop (and elsewhere) for managing wired and wireless network interfaces...

Earlier this week Arch Linux set the WirePlumber package to replace PipeWire-Media-Session. WirePlumber is the modern, feature-rich session manager for PipeWire and much better off than the reference PipeWire-Media-Session manager that is effectively unmaintained. But Arch Linux developers are now calling this premature and have reverted the change...

In addition to a new development release of Godot 4.0 out today, the other high profile open-source 3D game engine is Open 3D Engine (O3DE) that started last year from Amazon's Lumberyard Engine and now under the Linux Foundation's Open 3D Foundation. Out today is O3DE 22.05 for this high profile free software 3D game engine...

As outlined in yesterday's extensive article about NVIDIA's new open-source Linux kernel GPU driver, currently for consumer GeForce RTX GPUs the driver is considered of "alpha quality" while NVIDIA's initial focus has been on data center GPU support. In any event with having lots of Turing/Ampere GPUs around, I've been trying out this new open-source Linux kernel driver on the consumer GPUs. In particular, I've been curious about the performance of using this open-source kernel driver relative to the default, existing closed-source kernel driver. Here are some early benchmarks.

The AMD-owned Xilinx posted a new patch series today implementing a new DRM display driver for supporting their soft MIPI DSI Tx subsystem IP...

Given the NVIDIA open-source kernel driver code announcement from yesterday and also the Linux 5.19 merge window coming up soon with a host of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements and starting to prepare support for RDNA3, it's time for some fun with numbers around driver sizes...

Godot 4.0 continues working its way towards release as the most acclaimed open-source game engine. Godot 4.0 brings Vulkan rendering, OpenXR support, and a ton of other features covered in the past few years for making it more competitive with commercial game engines. Out this morning is Godot 4.0 Alpha 8 with a few more improvements worth noting...

While open-source fans this morning are celebrating NVIDIA finally publishing open-source kernel driver code as a step to opening up their driver, open-source AMD Radeon driver developers are proceeding as normal and undeterred by NVIDIA's open kernel-only approach. Another batch of AMD graphics code was sent in this morning to DRM-Next and then over in user-space Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed more task shader code...

While this week Microsoft issued a production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as its in-house Linux distribution, they are continuing to maintain CBL-Mariner 1.0 for the time being and have overnight issued its newest monthly release...