Phoronix

After looking yesterday at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of 2023, here is a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the more than 2,780 original news articles authored on Phoronix this calendar year...

Eric Engestrom has issued an on-time bi-weekly point release for the Mesa 3D graphics drivers today principally composed of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers commonly used by the Linux desktop...

One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.

Over the course of 2023 I authored 180 Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles, not to mention the thousands of original open-source/Linux news items. As we are about to hit the end of 2023, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of the year...

As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate...

Nobara 39 was released today as this modified Fedora Linux downstream that focuses on adding user-friendly fixes and various gamer/enthusiast type desktop optimizations...

With all of my initial Intel Core Ultra 7 155H benchmarking since last week from the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance to the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance it was at the Linux 6.7 kernel defaults / OS defaults. But for those wanting to push the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H further for better performance or conversely wanting to extend the battery life further for devices like the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) can be adjusted. Here's a look at the sometimes significant difference to power and performance when adjusting the Intel Meteor Lake CPU between the default balanced performance mode and the alternative power saver and performance modes.

One of the big milestones we are looking forward to in 2024 is the introduction of AMD Zen 5 processors. AMD Linux engineers have in recent months begun getting ready for those next-generation processors that look like will be Family 26 (1Ah) processors. We've been seeing more of the AMD "1Ah" patches and some more were posted today for some post-Christmas excitement before the new year...

Intel Linux engineers continue eagerly working on the Compute Express Link (CXL) code for the Linux kernel with more server hardware coming to market supporting this high-speed open standard for CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections...

As part of AMD's Platform Management Framework (PMF) and working on new Ryzen features like the Smart PC Solutions Builder, a set of patches are queued up ahead of the Linux 6.8 kernel cycle support for policy binary support with the PMF driver...

Similar to the long-worked-on GNOME dynamic triple buffering that is applied when the (most commonly integrated) graphics fall behind schedule in rendering the desktop, a merge request for KDE's KWin compositor has also seen similar work in this area for helping the iGPU catch-up in rendering via a "triple buffering" implementation...

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation...

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors...

Along with all of the other ongoing Intel Arrow Lake processor/platform enablement, the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel will have the sound driver support ready for landing...

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays to those celebrating any end-of-year holidays. In case you missed last month's cyber week special for a discounted rate on going ad-free, native dark mode, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits, it's back for Christmas week...

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations...

Intel's open-source Linux drivers for OpenGL (Iris) and Vulkan (ANV) this week for Mesa 24.0 received support for dual-SIMD8 dispatch on Gen12 graphics (Tigerlake) and newer...

While the Linux 6.7 release is being pushed back by one week due to the holidays and in turn the Linux 6.8 merge window not officially opening until 8 January, some pull requests do end up getting submitted early. The 1-wire bus driver changes for Linux 6.8 were sent out this week and most notably includes adding the AMD AXI 1-wire host driver...

With the Linux 6.7 kernel there is now KVM virtualization support for LoongArch CPUs. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, that KVM support is being further extended for these RISC-V-inspired and MIPS64-derived Chinese processors...