Phoronix News

Phoronix Six Great Features With The Upcoming Linux 6.6 Kernel Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features...

Phoronix KDE Desktop Cube Effect Returns & Plasma Wayland Per-Screen Color Management KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks...

Phoronix Canoeboot 20231026 Released As Another Fork Of Coreboot-Downstream Libreboot Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot...

Phoronix AMD Releases HIP RT 2.1 For Radeon Ray-Tracing AMD today announced the release of HIP RT 2.1, the newest version of its HIP ray-tracing library for use by Blender and other software...

Phoronix Google Cloud C3D Shows Great Performance With AMD EPYC Genoa Back in August Google Cloud announced the C3D instances powered by AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" processors while only last week was C3D promoted to general availability. Curious about the performance of C3D after being impressed by AMD EPYC Genoa bare-metal server performance at Phoronix as well as what I've seen with Genoa in the cloud at Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2 / AWS, here are some benchmarks of the new C3D up against other GCE instances.

Phoronix Last Minute Linux 6.6 Fixes Address Nine "Unusable" Lenovo AMD Laptops Linux 6.6 is set to be released as stable this weekend unless Linus Torvalds has reservations and decides to extend the cycle by one week. In any case there are some last minute fixes heading in to fix-up nine different Lenovo laptops with AMD Ryzen SoCs to make the hardware more usable under Linux...

Phoronix Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2023Q3 Released For Latest VA-API & QSV Code Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics...

Phoronix RADV Hooks Up Image Compression Control To Workaround Game Bugs Samuel Pitoiset on Valve's Linux graphics driver team has wired up VK_EXT_image_compression_control support to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) in order to workaround same game bugs being encountered with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton...

Phoronix OpenSSL 3.2 Reaches Beta With Client-Side QUIC, Zstd & Brotli Certificate Compression OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library...

Phoronix 9-Way AMD Ryzen 7000 Series Benchmarks On Linux 6.5 / Ubuntu 23.10 For those currently weighing between the (currently) nine different AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors for Linux use, here are fresh benchmarks of the Zen 4 desktop CPU line-up while testing with Ubuntu 23.10 and the Linux 6.5 kernel...

Phoronix Fedora 39 Delayed To At Least 7 November While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November...

Phoronix Ubuntu 24.04 "Noble Numbat" Opens For Development The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release...

Phoronix RadeonSI Completes ACO Compiler Support With Mesa 24.0 With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end...

Phoronix AMD-Powered Framework Laptop Now Working On Linux With Latest BIOS Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux...

Phoronix Servo Web Engine Made Some Nice Progress In October The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged...

Phoronix Intel's Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I've been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.

Phoronix Linux Mint Starts Working On Wayland For Cinnamon, Likely Not Fully Ready Until 2026 Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support...

Phoronix Blender 4.1 To Support Cycles Renderer On AMD RDNA3 APUs Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year...

Phoronix File Searching On KDE Plasma 6.0 To Use Less CPU Resources & Better Usability Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area...

Phoronix Experimental Zero-Copy Support For Nouveau With GNOME Mutter Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver...