Proton 9.0 RC2 Makes More Windows Games Playable On Linux, Other Fixes

Valve and CodeWeavers today released the Proton 9.0 Release Candidate 2 build based off Wine 9.0 for powering Steam Play to enjoy an excellent assortment of modern (and legacy) Windows games on Linux...

New Patches Significantly Reduce Zink Driver Startup Time

Given a two year old bug against Mesa around slow initialization/start-up time for GTK4 on Intel graphics, prolific Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently took to optimizing Zink's start-up time for this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation...

GNOME Foundation To Focus On Fundraising After Years Running A Deficit

After several years of the GNOME Foundation running at a deficit (loss), the GNOME Foundation is going to be driving a push for greater fundraising...

GCC 14.1 Compiler Aiming For Release Around 7 May

As mentioned following the AMD GFX90C target being added, the GCC 14 compiler code was branched from the main Git branch with release preparations for GCC 14 underway. A status report was just published outlining release plans for getting GCC 14.1 stable out around 7 May...

GCC 14 Adds "GFX90C" For OpenMP Offloading To APUs With GFX9/Vega Graphics

As the last feature patch prior to the GCC 14 compiler code being branched today and GCC 15 opening up on the mainline codebase, AMD GFX90C support was merged for enabling GPU OpenMP device offloading to the numerous AMD SoCs/APUs with the GFX9/Vega graphics...

Linux 6.10 Adding Intel Low-Latency Hint To Aggressively Boost GT Frequency For GPU Compute

Following the big set of Xe DRM driver updates for Linux 6.10 and earlier Adaptive Snyc SDP, Lunar Lake display support, and more DG2 PCI IDs for i915 pulls sent in over weeks prior for this next kernel version, the drm-intel-gt-next pull request was submitted today for last minute Intel graphics driver feature changes aiming for Linux 6.10...

AMDGPU Linux Driver Patches Enable SOC24 & MMHUB 4.1.x IP

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers continue being quite busy preparing for multiple new hardware IP...

Servo Web Engine Now Passing Acid2 Layout Engine Test

The Servo web engine developers have enjoyed a busy April with a number of new features added to this Rust creation...

Microsoft Open-Sources MS-DOS 4.0 Under MIT License

After publishing open-source versions of MS-DOS years ago for versions 1.25 and 2.0, Microsoft and IBM have now announced that MS-DOS 4.0 has been open-sourced under an MIT license...

Systemd 256-rc1 Brings A Huge Number Of New Features

Systemd 256-rc1 is available this evening and it comes with many new features and improvements to existing features. It's a big one...

NVIDIA Developer Opens Feature Pull Request For Open-Source NVK Driver

If your interest didn't pique enough when the former Nouveau lead developer joined NVIDIA and sent out a big patch series for this originally-reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA kernel driver, here's another plot twist: another NVIDIA engineer opening a merge request adding to the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver...

Red Hat Offering Up To 4 Years Extra Support For RHEL7

This year already marks ten years since the introduction of RHEL 7. While the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support period is typically 10 years, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 they have decided to extend that by up to four years with Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS)...

Wayland 1.23 Alpha Released With OpenBSD Support & New APIs

As expected, the Wayland 1.23 Alpha release is now available as this next Wayland release looks to officially roll-out toward the end of May...

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X & Intel Core i9 14900K: Ubuntu 22.04 vs. 23.10 vs. 24.04 Linux Performance

As part of my ongoing benchmarking of the newly-released Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Linux distribution, today's focus is looking at the high-end Intel Core i9 14900K and AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktops while comparing the performance across Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for dozens of workloads.

Intel Releases OpenVINO 2024.1 With More Gen AI & LLM Features

Intel engineers have just released OpenVINO 2024.1, the newest feature release for this excellent open-source AI toolkit that continues expanding its features and capabilities particularly around Generative AI "GenAI" and Large Language Models (LLMs)...

Sovereign Tech Fund Makes New Investments Into GNOME & PHP, Bug Bounty For systemd

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making significant, much-needed investments into various open-source upstream projects from the GNOME desktop to Rust-written Coreutils and more. Today the Sovereign Tech Fund outlined their latest funding for advancing the open-source software ecosystem...

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Downloads Now Available

The release ISOs for Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" are now available! Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features...

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Enables VK_KHR_shader_float_controls2

Following yesterday's Mesa 24.1 feature branching, Mesa 24.2-devel is now open for the Mesa Git mainline code and some early feature work has begun for that Q3 release series...

Fedora Miracle Spin Proposed For Fedora 41

Not to be confused with Fedora's "Beefy Miracle" from a decade ago during their entertaining codename days, but a Fedora Miracle spin has been proposed for the now-open Fedora 41 development cycle...

Llamafile 0.8 Releases With LLaMA3 & Grok Support, Faster F16 Performance

Llamafile has been quite an interesting project out of Mozilla's Ocho group in the era of AI. Llamafile makes it easy to run and distribute large language models (LLMs) that are self-contained within a single file. Llamafile builds off Llama.cpp and makes it easy to ship an entire LLM as a single file with both CPU and GPU execution support. Llamafile 0.8 is out now to join in on the LLaMA3 fun as well as delivering other model support and enhancing the CPU performance...

Etnaviv NPU Optimizations Make It Into Mesa 24.1

In addition to many RadeonSI driver optimizations that were merged just prior to yesterday's code branching and Mesa 24.1-rc1 release, a number of Etnaviv driver improvements were also merged for benefiting that recent Vivante NPU IP open-source driver work...

Mesa 24.1-rc1 Released With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Improvements

Shortly following today's Mesa 24.1 code branching, the first release candidate has been announced by ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom...

RadeonSI Squeezes "Many Improvements Around The Whole Driver" Into Mesa 24.1

Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged...

Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 Adds Radeon GPU Analyzer Interoperability

AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer...

GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 Compiler Performance On Fedora 40

One of the leading-edge benefits of Fedora Linux is that it always ships with the most up-to-date open-source compiler toolchains at release. For their spring releases each year, it typically means shipping with a GCC compiler that isn't even officially released as stable yet. With this week's release of Fedora 40, it's shipping with GCC 14.0.1 as the development version that will culminate with the inaugural GCC 14 stable release in the coming weeks. Plus Fedora 40 has all of the other latest GNU toolchain components and then over on the LLVM side is with the current LLVM 18 stable series. For those curious how GCC 14 vs. LLVM Clang 18 performance is looking, here is a wide range of C/C++ benchmarks carried out on Fedora Workstation 40 using a System76 Thelio Major workstation powered by the Zen 4 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X.

New AMD Linux Patch Acknowledges More Zen 5 CPU Models

A new AMD Linux kernel patch queued today via "x86/urgent" for routing into the Linux 6.9 development kernel expands the range of recognized CPU model IDs for upcoming Zen 5 processors...

Red Hat Releases DNF 4.20 In Preparation For DNF5

DNF 4.20 was released this morning by Red Hat as a stepping stone toward the upcoming DNF5 package manager...

Polychromatic 0.9 OpenRazer GUI Frontend Released With Port To PyQt6

Polychromatic is the open-source software package that serves as a GUI front-end to the OpenRazer drivers for allowing Razer devices to be configured under Linux for managing keyboard/mice RGB lighting and other options. With today's Polychromatic 0.9 release there is a port for the Qt6 toolkit...

TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 Released For A Wonderful NAS Platform

The folks at iXsystems have released TrueNAS SCALEE 24.04 as the newest iteration of their Linux-based platform for network attached storage (NAS) devices. TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 brings better performance, new features, and additional hardware support...

Nginx 1.26 Released With Experimental HTTP/3 Support

Nginx 1.26 stable is out as the newest version of this popular alternative to the Apache web server while also able to work as a load balancer, reverse proxy, and HTTP cache. Nginx 1.26 incorporates the great work from the Nginx 1.25 mainline branch such as experimental HTTP/3 support...

Wine's Wayland Driver Will Finally Set The Window Title

A small but notable patch was merged to upstream Wine overnight: the window title for application windows is now actually set under Wayland...

QEMU 9.0 Released WIth True Multi-Queue Support For VirtIO Block Driver

QEMU 9.0 is out tonight as the latest feature release for this prominent component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

FFmpeg Makes Progress On Dolby Vision Support

The widely-used, open-source FFmpeg multimedia library has seen commits this week advancing its support for Dolby Vision...

Mozilla Has Been Rewriting Its Crash Reporter In Rust

Mozilla hopes you'll never have to see it, but they've been rewriting their crash reporting application for Firefox within the Rust programming language...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 drives. Arriving so far are the Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R and Kioxia KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5 SSDs. Here are a few benchmarks of those drives for those curious about the performance.

Audacity 3.5 Brings Cloud Project Saving, Improved BSD Support

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out today with a big feature update in the form of Audacity 3.5...

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...

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...