7 Hours Ago - Free Software - GIMP 3.0 RC2 - Add A Comment
The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 image editing program that is a free software alternative to Adobe Photoshop will not see its stable release in 2024... But just before the New Year, the GIMP 3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for testing.
10 Hours Ago - GNOME - GNOME Viewer Image Editing - 20 Comments
The GNOME Image Viewer has merged initial support for basic image editing capabilities into the application.
27 December 02:46 PM EST - WINE - Rusty Bottles - 27 Comments
Bottles as the open-source manager for Wine to more easily run Windows games and applications on Linux has been pursuing the "Bottles Next" initiative as a rewrite to this software. The Bottles developers have decided they will be leveraging the Rust programming language as well as the libcosmic UI toolkit as part of this rewrite.
27 December 01:11 PM EST - Arm - HUAWEI MateBook E Go - 2 Comments
A new set of patches implement EC, UCSI, and PSY drivers for the ARM-based HUAWEI MateBook E Go laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. In turn these new Linux kernel patches get a lot more functionality working for these Huawei ARM64 laptops.
27 December 10:43 AM EST - Operating Systems - 4 Comments
Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta performance as well as the AlmaLinux 10 beta, on the same AMD EPYC server here are benchmarks when adding in CentOS Stream 10 to the mix. CentOS Stream 10 as the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is largely similar to what's found in the RHEL 10.0 beta but one of the key differences is being powered by Linux 6.12 LTS rather than Linux 6.11 as currently used by the AlmaLinux/RHEL 10 beta. Here is how the performance of CentOS Stream 10 is looking in comparison on the same hardware.
27 December 10:35 AM EST - AMD - AMD 2024 Highlights - 9 Comments
AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware.
27 December 10:09 AM EST - Google - Faster Page Installation - Add A Comment
A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14.
27 December 06:48 AM EST - Hardware - OneXPlayer - Add A Comment
OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving.
27 December 06:31 AM EST - GNOME - GNOME 2024 - 7 Comments
The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year.
27 December 06:13 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Preempt Lazy For PowerPC - Add A Comment
Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms.
26 December 05:26 PM EST - Programming - Open-Source Compilers - 1 Comment
Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix.
26 December 12:30 PM EST - KDE - KDE 2024 Highlights - 26 Comments
The KDE desktop progress made over the course of 2024 was particularly stand-out thanks to the Plasma 6.0 debut near the beginning of the year and then Plasma 6.1 and 6.2 further stabilizing and polishing this open-source desktop. It was a very fine year for the KDE desktop.
26 December 11:30 AM EST - Software - 30 Comments
Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.
26 December 08:55 AM EST - Intel - Intel 2024 Highlights - Add A Comment
In addition to the exciting hardware launches this year particularly around Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake processors, and the new low-cost Battlemage graphics cards, what remains particularly exciting and consistent are all of Intel's great investments around open-source and Linux. Over 2024 there were many exciting performance optimizations, new Linux kernel features, GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain improvements, and countless other enhancements made throughout the open-source ecosystem by Intel engineers.
26 December 06:55 AM EST - AMD - AMD P-State Change - 2 Comments
AMD Ryzen systems with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel may see increased power savings out-of-the-box due to an AMD P-State driver change queued up as part of the new power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel.
26 December 06:47 AM EST - Linux Storage - Reiser5 Dead - 27 Comments
It was on New Year's Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn't been touched in quite a while.
26 December 06:22 AM EST - Linux Storage - pre-content fanotify - Add A Comment
Queued up by way of linux-fs.git's "for_next" Git branch is the fanotify HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) implementation via the pre-content fanotify patch series.
26 December 06:00 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Reproducible Kernel Builds - Add A Comment
An interesting request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted on Christmas for introducing hash-based integrity checking to help with the reproducible builds initiative around the Linux kernel.
25 December 12:33 PM EST - Linux Networking - RNDIS Removal For 2025?! - 45 Comments
There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic.
25 December 09:46 AM EST - systemd - systemd 2024 - 9 Comments
Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more.
25 December 06:46 AM EST - Intel - Intel SIMD8 Compiler Bits - 6 Comments
A patch series six months in the making and consisting of 24 patches by longtime Intel Linux graphics engineer Ian Romanick was merged on Christmas Eve for Mesa 25.0.
25 December 06:09 AM EST - Programming - Ruby 3.4 - 10 Comments
Ruby 3.4 is out today as yet another annual major feature release for this programming language known for its major updates on Christmas Day.
25 December 05:00 AM EST - Intel - Vulkan Video AV1 Decode - 10 Comments
While there has been Vulkan Video support within Intel's open-source "ANV" driver since early 2023 and extended over time to handle H.265/HEVC decode, H.264 and H.265 encode, and more, the AV1 decode support has lagged behind until now.
25 December 03:00 AM EST - Operating Systems - CachyOS 2024 - 21 Comments
The CachyOS Linux distribution has really been on fire this year delivering impressive new features and performance optimizations for this Arch Linux derived OS.
24 December 04:12 PM EST - Linux Kernel - 2024 Linux Kernel News - 44 Comments
With 2024 drawing quickly toward a close, here is a look back at the most popular Linux kernel news of the year ranging from exciting performance optimizations and new features such as QR code error messages over to kernel drama around Russian kernel developers, Bcachefs disturbances, and the contentious growing Rust programming language use within the kernel.
24 December 01:56 PM EST - Linux Gaming - SDL System Tray Support - 40 Comments
A new feature landing in the SDL3 software/hardware abstraction library today that is commonly used by cross-platform games is a native system tray implementation that works across operating systems.
24 December 10:30 AM EST - Processors - 4 Comments
Using the 5th Gen EPYC BIOS tuning guide published by AMD, I recently looked at the impact of AI and machine learning optimized performance by adjusting some simple BIOS knobs as well as the Java throughput, latency and power efficiency for the EPYC 9005 class processors. In this article is following the AMD BIOS tuning guide to see what performance difference there is for high performance computing (HPC) workloads following the BIOS tuning recommendations compared to the defaults with an AMD EPYC 9575F server.
24 December 09:30 AM EST - Mesa - Open-Source Goodness - 5 Comments
Longtime open-source Radeon graphics driver developer Marek Olšák that is well known for his Mesa improvements over the years and countless optimizations even before being employed by AMD has seen some exciting patches merged just in time for Christmas.
The Intel Compute Runtime 24.48.31907.7 just released a few minutes ago as a Christmas Eve treat for Intel Linux graphics compute users. This updated open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero driver stack now advertises production support for Battlemage (BMG / Xe2) discrete graphics along with other optimization and feature work.
24 December 06:40 AM EST - Linux Storage - Uncached Buffered IO - 10 Comments
Linux I/O expert and storage expert Jens Axboe of Meta is hoping to have the uncached buffered I/O support squared away for Linux 6.14 -- a feature that's been a half-decade in the making.
24 December 06:26 AM EST - Multimedia - libcamera - 3 Comments
A new release of libcamera is now available for this open-source camera stack solution that is increasingly used now for getting newer web cameras working on Linux and similar. With the libcamera 0.4 release there is improved hardware support and other enhancements to this camera framework solution.
The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver is set to see some enhancements come the Linux 6.14 merge window.
24 December 05:54 AM EST - Multimedia - FFmpeg HDR - 25 Comments
The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library saw a number of commits land yesterday for enhancing the support around High Dynamic Range (HDR) content.
23 December 04:08 PM EST - Ubuntu - Ubuntu 25.04 + GIMP 3.0 - 16 Comments
As a follow-up to the article about Ubuntu 25.04 preparing for GIMP 3.0 in its repositories, this past week finally brought the GIMP 3.0 release candidate into the Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" repository.
23 December 02:06 PM EST - Intel - ASRock B570 - 13 Comments
The Intel Arc Graphics B570 graphics card isn't hitting retailers until January and the review embargo doesn't expire until then, but fair game now are pictures/video of the Arc B570 hardware... The ASRock Challenger Arc Graphics B570 arrived today for Linux testing at Phoronix in the coming weeks for this second Battlemage graphics card.
23 December 09:30 AM EST - Linux Kernel - Linux 6.14 Rust Device Drivers - 36 Comments
The patch series in the works for a while to provide the necessary kernel abstractions for the Rust programming language to actually implement real device drivers looks like it will finally premiere in the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.
23 December 07:13 AM EST - Operating Systems - Serpent OS - 41 Comments
It's been a few months since hearing anything new out of Serpent OS, the original Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty, who started Solus Linux and also was involved with Intel's Clear Linux. As a Christmas surprise, Serpent OS has now reached the alpha stage of development.
23 December 06:46 AM EST - AMD - AMD Zen Optimizations - 12 Comments
Eric Biggers of Google who has pursued countless CPU optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto subsystem over the years has some noteworthy optimizations coming for AMD processors with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.
23 December 06:25 AM EST - Intel - GDB / GNU Debugger - 3 Comments
Intel engineers are working on contributing upstream support to the GNU Debugger (GDB) for debugging software running on Intel GPUs.
23 December 06:19 AM EST - Hardware - evbug - 5 Comments
Linux 6.13 cleared out more than 100k lines of old and unmaintained code while that end of year code cleaning isn't stopping... With Linux 6.14 at least another old and seemingly useless driver is being gutted from the input subsystem: evbug.
AMD has squeezed in one more open-source Vulkan driver update for the year to benefit Linux gamers and others wanting to use this official AMD Vulkan Linux driver option.