Phoronix

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...

LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like the Clang compiler are now under a feature freeze and branched from the main code-base ahead of the stable 15.0 release in September...

The OpenMandriva crew behind this long ago Mandriva/Mandrake-derived distribution announced their Lx ROME technical preview release as their rolling release version of the operating system...

Last month KDE Plasma 5.25 released as the newest feature release to this Qt-based open-source desktop environment. Unfortunately for FreeBSD desktop users, those using KDE will be stuck for a while longer on Plasma 5.24 due to missing security infrastructure...

There are a few Fedora Spins/Labs versions at risk of being removed with Fedora 37 this autumn unless new maintainers step up...

Oracle has issued its newest quarterly release of GraalVM as its high performance Java JVM/JDK that also supports additional execution models and programming languages. GraalVM 22.2 is this newest version and contains a number of different optimizations for its growing number of components...

Mesa's Turnip driver that provides open-source Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors continues maturing nicely and is approaching Vulkan 1.3 conformance...

Mozilla's Firefox 103 web browser is now available from mirrors as the latest monthly update to this open-source, cross-platform browser...

The "THP_SWAP" option for the Linux kernel allows swapping transparent huge-pages in one piece without splitting. With Linux 5.20 the 64-bit Arm kernel (ARM64 / AArch64) will now support this option as a performance optimization...

For the past several years Latte Dock has been a popular macOS-like "dock" for the KDE Plasma desktop but development has now ceased...

Back in 2020 Intel announced OSPRay Studio as an interactive, ray-traced visualizer that was added to their oneAPI software suite and powered by their OSPRay engine. Released on Monday was the latest update to this open-source program...

Earlier this year I wrote about the Intel Idle driver support being prepared for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs but a limitation with these forthcoming Xeon Scalable processors was that C1 and C1E c-states handling are now mutually exclusive. Unlike earlier Xeon processors, C1 and C1E states couldn't be enabled at the same time. Fortunately, via new Intel firmware they have managed to overcome this limitation...

After years in the works, the "PREEMPT_RT" support for building a real-time Linux kernel might finally be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle if the last few remaining bits are reviewed/signed-off on in time for next week's merge window...

NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations...

Last week when posting my initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U performance (and also looking at the AMD Rembrandt Windows vs. Linux speed), there were two main areas to get excited about with these AMD Zen 3+ SoCs: nice power efficiency improvements across many real-world workloads and the graphics upgrade with the integrated Radeon 680M. In this article are more tests of the Radoen 680M graphics looking at the integrated graphics speed-up with RDNA2 finally replacing Vega as a big upgrade and also how this compares to the Intel Alder Lake P Xe Graphics performance for Linux laptops.

ByteDance as the Chinese company behind TikTok has been working on a number of Linux kernel optimizations the past few years and their most recent work is for faster Kexec rebooting of the kernel. With their massive fleet of servers powering TikTok and other apps, they will do whatever they can to shave milliseconds off the boot/reboot time of their servers and that is what most of their Linux optimizations have been about -- including this newest patch series for faster Kexec reboots...

Samsung has posted a set of Linux kernel patches for enabling their Trinity neural processing unit (NPU) hardware as accelerators found within some of their embedded systems. Samsung Trinity NPUs have been in use since 2018 and their newer Trinity "TRIV2" accelerator is found within the latest Samsung TVs for AI purposes. Samsung hopes to upstream this new Linux driver simply named "trinity" into the mainline kernel...

Intel and MediaTek have just announced a strategic partnership where some future chips for MediaTek will be manufactured by Intel Foundry Services (IFS)...

The VKMS driver within the Linux kernel allows for virtual kernel mode-setting as a software-only KMS/DRM driver that can be used for virtual testing purposes and other uses around headless systems. New patches out of Google are working on ConfigFS support for this virtual display driver and from there making it easy to build out your own virtual graphics device configuration with VKMS...

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle the RISC-V CPU architecture's default kernel configuration "defconfig" is being tweaked so it's capable of running Docker out-of-the-box...