Phoronix

FreeBSD 14 has been released as stable today as the newest major release of this leading open-source BSD operating system...

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver atop the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite cases. Though don't get your hopes too high for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as the performance is still overall slow and the driver stack remains a work-in-progress, but at least it's a step in the right direction...

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available...

Last month AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series along with the new Threadripper PRO 7000 WX Series for bringing Zen 4 to the HEDT and workstation space. Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available via DIY retailers on the 21st, today marks the review/performance embargo expiration for the Threadripper 7000 series. First up today is a look at how the new Threadripper 7970X 32-core and Threadripper 7980X 64-core processors are performing for Linux HEDT workstations... Or the TLDR: the incredible Linux performance and potential for a wide-range of creator and developer workloads now possible with the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X/7980X Linux benchmark review shows just how well the new Zen 4 powered HEDT Threadripper processors can perform with up to the 64 core flagship offering. The results were stunning while today the review embargo also expires on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series for the professional-catered SKUs that offer up to 96 cores and support up to 8 channel DDR5 system memory. Here are the initial benchmarks of the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX for showing the performance potential of this outright workstation performance monster if your budget allows.

Feature development on GCC 14 is now largely over with today marking the start of their stage three of development that is the "general bugfixing mode" and moving past new features for this next annual GNU Compiler Collection release...

Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante's NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously...

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it easy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year...

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release...

Narrowly missing the Linux 6.7 merge window that closed last week is the AMD 1-Wire "AXI" driver but it's now on tap for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year...

Luc Verhaegen has announced the return of the Graphics DevRoom for FOSDEM 2024 taking place in early February in Brussels...

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12...

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary...

The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster...

In addition to the many OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver improvements building up for Mesa 24.0, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has also been preparing some video acceleration improvements for this next quarterly release...

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations...

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration...

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there's been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February...

A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine's Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement...