Intel Has Many Improvements For The Xe Graphics Driver In Linux 6.10
Intel today sent out more than one hundred new feature patches to DRM-Next of new “Xe” kernel graphics driver material they have readied for the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel merge window… ⌘ Read more

Framework Raises $18M In New Funding, More Collaborations Coming With Cooler Master
The folks behind the very popular Framework upgradeable/modular laptops announced today $18M in new funding and a few other interesting details… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux 40 Available For Download As A Wonderful Upgrade
It’s Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

NVK Vulkan Driver Adds Implicit Pipeline Caching To Boost DXVK Performance
Adding to the impressive number of features to be found in this quarter’s Mesa 24.1 release is now the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver supporting implicit pipeline caching… ⌘ Read more

CBD Proposed For The Linux Kernel: CXL Block Device
The latest Compute Express Link (CXL) feature work being pursued for the mainline Linux kernel is a driver to create CXL block devices for storage. On Monday a “request for comments” patch series sent out the initial code for setting up CXL shared memory to be used as Linux block devices… ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs Sends In More Fixes For Linux 6.9: Recovery & Repair Issues Settling Down
Another week, another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD Prepping Fixes & Enhancements For P-State CPUFreq Driver
The AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Zen 2 and newer processors has been working out well in its roughly two years of being in the mainline Linux kernel. The AMD P-State driver has helped with ensuring modern Ryzen systems are delivering optimal performance and power efficiency. Recently AMD Linux engineers have been working on a few fixes and enhancements to this CPUFreq driver… ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 9.4 Released With Security & Stability Fixes
NetBSD 10.0 debuted last month with a long list of improvements and other enhancements that built up over the past several years. For those not yet taking the leap to this big NetBSD update, NetBSD 9.4 is out today for those relying on the stable NetBSD 9 series… ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux Changes The Default Scaling Factor For 4K Displays
With tonight’s Steam client beta update they have reduced the default scaling factor for those running it on Linux with a 4K display… ⌘ Read more

Linux AMDGPU Control Application Adds vBIOS Dumping, Fan Control Hysteresis
LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed “Linux AMDGPU Control Application” for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 1.9.17 Adds Firmware Updating For ASUS DC201 & Realtek RTS541x
Richard Hughes of Red Hat has announced the released of Fwupd 1.9.17, the newest update to this open-source solution for system and device firmware updating under Linux that is paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for a streamlined user experience… ⌘ Read more

Reverse Engineered MSI WMI Platform Driver Being Worked On For Linux
Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features… ⌘ Read more

Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R & KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5.0 SSDs
While there is a growing number of PCIe 5.0 consumer NVMe SSDs available through Internet retailers, when it comes to PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD data center / enterprise grade solid-state drives there aren’t as many yet and even for announced ones they have been relatively in short supply. In preparing for some upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS tests and ahead of next-gen servers arriving, I was recently searching for some new PCIe 5.0 data center solid state driv … ⌘ Read more

Steam Deck Motion Sensors Being Worked On For Linux’s HID-Steam Driver
A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller… ⌘ Read more

Intel Enabling Linux Driver Display Support For Upcoming “Battlemage” GPUs
Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist… ⌘ Read more

AMD: “Additional Parts Of The Radeon Stack To Be Open Sourced Throughout The Year”
After recently announcing they’d be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend… ⌘ Read more

AMD SEV-SNP Hypervisor Support Nears The Mainline Linux Kernel
AMD’s upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision… ⌘ Read more

Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 Brings Arrow Lake H Support
The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company’s modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc5 Released: The Diffstat “Looks A Bit Wonky” But Not Bad
The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts RDNA3+ Firmware Files For Linux Users
This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / “RDNA3 refresh” / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 46.1 Brings Explicit Sync, Better NVIDIA Hybrid GPU Acceleration
GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series… ⌘ Read more

GNU Portability Library’s Tool Rewritten In Python For 8~100x Better Performance
The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation… ⌘ Read more

EROFS Eyes Zstd Compression, Intel QAT/IAA Accelerator Support, & Experimental Rust Code
The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.9-rc5 Picking Up Fixes For Intel FRED, BHI & GFNI/VAES Checks
Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week’s batch of “x86/urgent” fixes were sent out this morning… ⌘ Read more

Niri 0.1.5 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Adds New Animations
Niri as an innovative, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor is out today with its newest feature release… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Working To Make Key Rack A Viable Password Manager, Better Printing For Flatpaks
This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines ongoing exciting work to the desktop thanks to the additional funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund plus a variety of other ongoing desktop/app enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Linux BHI Mitigation Being Tweaked Following 12% Database Performance Hit
A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source “Terakan” Vulkan Driver For Radeon HD 6000 Series Shown On Windows
The past year there’s been an independent open-source driver developer working on “Terakan” as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin “Triang3l” has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominant … ⌘ Read more

KDE Developers Work Through More Bug Fixes & Features For Plasma 6.1
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to outline all of the prominent feature work and fixes that landed in the KDE space this week… ⌘ Read more

Wine 9.7 Works On Build System For ARM64X, Other ARM Improvements
Wine 9.7 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly unstable development release for this open-source software to run Windows programs and games under Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Finally Begins Offering Firefox ARM64 Linux Binaries
While the Firefox web browser has long worked on AArch64 Linux and Mozilla even offers Windows ARM64/AArch64 binaries, to date Mozilla hasn’t released official ARM64/AArch64 binaries for Linux. That is finally beginning to change… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.45 Begins Landing Code For SHA1 & SHA256 Interoperability For Repositories
Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories… ⌘ Read more

Godot’s Vulkan Backend Seeing Better Performance, 10~20% Reduction In Frame Times
The Godot game engine has spent the past number of months collaborating with Google and The Forge to bring performance optimizations to their Vulkan back-end. While the immediate focus was on bettering Godot’s Vulkan performance for Android mobile devices, this work will ultimately benefit all Vulkan platforms/users… ⌘ Read more

Miracle-WM 0.2 Released For Mir-Based Wayland Compositor
Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.10 Preps A Kernel Panic Screen - Sort Of A “Blue Screen of Death”
While systemd 255 last year introduced a “blue screen of death” inspired solution with systemd-bsod for presenting logged error messages full-screen, it’s not appropriate for all errors. Systemd-bsod can work out for presenting full-screen messages in case of boot failures and other problems where user-space is alive. But the user-space code does little good in case of a kernel panic and similar issues bringing the system to a halt. Set … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 Brings Improved OpenCL/OpenGL Sharing
As the first new release to Intel’s open-source Compute Runtime stack in about one month for this OpenCL and Level Zero compute support, Intel Compute Runtime 24.13.29138.7 was released this morning with much improved OpenCL/OpenGL sharing and interoperability on Linux, out-of-the-box support for the Xe kernel graphics driver, new optimizations, and many other changes… ⌘ Read more

Tow-Boot 2023.07 U-Boot Distribution Released With New Board Support
It’s been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader… ⌘ Read more

Rockchip NPU Open-Source Driver Taking Shape, Will Aim For Upstream Accel Driver
It was just one month ago that open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso was beginning work on reverse-engineering and writing a Rockchip NPU driver following his work on the Vivante NPU IP open-source driver support. He quickly began seeing the driver working and with very viable performance and now today he’s shared another update on this Rockchip open-source NPU driver effort… ⌘ Read more

Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 Brings VP9 Fix & AV1 Refinements
Overnight Intel released their oneVPL GPU Runtime 2024Q1 release for this media stack component to their oneAPI software collection… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release Next Week
After not being ready in time for this week’s early release target date, it’s now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week… ⌘ Read more

Rust-Written LAVD Kernel Scheduler Shows Promising Results For Linux Gaming
Changwoo Min with Igalia presented yesterday at Open-Source Summit North America on optimizing the kernel’s scheduler for Linux gaming. Of course, the motivation is around Valve’s Steam Deck but for Linux gaming at large to benefit too from this scheduler work to ideally yield less stuttering during gameplay… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 Boosts Performance, Outperforming Windows 11 On The AMD Ryzen Framework 16 Laptop
With the Framework 16 laptop one of the performance pieces I’ve been meaning to carry out has been seeing out Linux performs against Microsoft Windows 11 for this AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS powered modular/upgradeable laptop. Recently getting around to it in my benchmarking queue, I also compared the performance of Ubuntu 23.10 to the near final Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on this laptop up against a fully-updated Microsoft Windows 11 … ⌘ Read more

openSUSE Factory Achieves Bit-By-Bit Reproducible Builds
While Fedora 41 in late 2024 is aiming to have more reproducible package builds, openSUSE Factory has already achieved a significant milestone in bit-by-bit reproducible builds… ⌘ Read more

Intel Preps Adaptive Sync SDP, Lunar Lake Display & More DG2 PCI IDs In Linux 6.10
On Wednesday the latest round of drm-intel-next material was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. Intel’s open-source engineers remain very busy working on the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers with new display features, expanding hardware support, and other functionality… ⌘ Read more

Autodafe 0.2 Released For Freeing Your Project From Autotools
Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides “tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools.”.. ⌘ Read more

GTK4 Continues Improving Graphics Offload & DMA-BUF Integration
There is a new post on the GTK blog outlining some of the recent enhancements to this open-source toolkit for benefiting the graphics/GPU offloading capabilities… ⌘ Read more

Rocky Linux To Support Upstream Stable Kernels
With the various Linux distributions derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we’re beginning to see more features to distinguish between them rather than just “RHEL clones”. It was just days ago talking about AlmaLinux restoring old hardware support that’s been deprecated by upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now over on the Rocky Linux side, CIQ as the principal organization behind them is rolling out support for upstream Linux kernels… ⌘ Read more

System76’s COSMIC Working On Drag & Drop, More Compositor Improvements
System76 software engineers continue working heavily on their COSMIC desktop that is Rust-written and to debut with their Pop!_OS 24.04 release later this year… ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.38 Media Player Released With New Options & Fixes
MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging FFmpeg is out with its newest release… ⌘ Read more

Wayland Protocols 1.35 Introduces Alpha Modifier Protocol, Tablet-V2 As Stable
Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications… ⌘ Read more