All the pieces have been aligned that the mainline Linux 6.8 kernel should be able to boot on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC without any out-of-tree patches being necessary…

Source: Phoronix – Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Will Be Able To Boot On The Mainline Linux 6.8 Kernel

While Intel Meteor Lake processors only launched last week, Intel Linux engineers have already been busy for some time enabling next-generation Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Lunar Lake Thunderbolt Support Being Prepped For Linux

A new driver set to be merged in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle is “gigabyte_waterforce” as a new kernel driver for supporting Gigabyte AORUS Waterforce AIO coolers…

Source: Phoronix – Gigabyte Waterforce AIO Cooler Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.8

For Mesa 23.1 earlier this year initial RADV Vulkan Video decode support was merged for supporting GPU-based video acceleration with this Khronos video API. As we approach the end of the year, RADV’s Vulkan Video encode support remains a work-in-progress but hopefully won’t be too much longer before being upstreamed…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Vulkan Video Encoding Still Being Worked On

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared a status update on the current state of HDR support for the KDE Plasma desktop…

Source: Phoronix – It’s Looking Like 2024 Could Be The Year Of HDR On The Linux Desktop

Linux 6.7-rc6 was released today while the final release of Linux 6.7 is likely to come New Year’s weekend and complicating the opening of the Linux 6.8 merge window around the end-of-year holidays…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7-rc6 Released: “Various Random Fixes All Over”

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there’s been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced…

Source: Phoronix – The First Rust-Written Network PHY Driver Set To Land In Linux 6.8

While not talked about as much as the AMD open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux, AMD’s multimedia stack on Linux continues to be improved upon for supporting new use-cases with AMD-based Linux deployments continuing to come up in the embedded space for all different applications like in-vehicle infotainment systems. The newest AMD video acceleration feature to now be wired up to their open-source Mesa code is enabling region of interest (ROI) encoding functionality…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Enables VCN Region Of Interest “ROI” Video Encoder Support For Linux GPU Drivers

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux graphics driver…

Source: Phoronix – For At Least One Game, Mesa’s NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA’s Proprietary Driver

A new Long-Term Support version of Cloud Hypervisor was released this week, which is the open-source project originally started by Intel as a cloud-focused and Rust-written VMM that now has wide industry backing including from multiple other CPU vendors…

Source: Phoronix – Cloud Hypervisor 37 LTS Released With Faster VM Restoration From Snapshots

Back in October the Milk-V Oasis mITX board was announced with this RISC-V board being powered by a 16-core Sophgo SG2380 SoC featuring SiFive-designed cores: 12 P cores and four E cores. While that Milk-V Oasis board isn’t expected to ship until Q3’2024, Milk-V shared this week that the SG2380 RISC-V SoC has been revised with additional capabilities…

Source: Phoronix – Sophgo SG2380 RISC-V SoC To Now Support Up To 96GB RAM, Additional PCIe & 25 GbE

As part of Intel’s ongoing quest for maximizing the compute performance of their GPUs/accelerators, their compiler engineers have proposed introducing a XeGPU dialect for LLVM’s MLIR…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Proposing XeGPU Dialect For LLVM MLIR

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward…

Source: Phoronix – Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future

A change merged to the X.Org Server Git for the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver is helping conserve some power consumption at least for Intel graphics by determining the optimal hardware cursor size…

Source: Phoronix – xf86-video-modesetting Driver Optimization Helps Conserve Intel Power Consumption

On Friday in addition to Intel submitting their new Xe kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.8, the red team sent in their latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes ahead of this next kernel cycle. Exciting on the AMD side is landing the AMD color management properties support! But on the downside, it’s compile-time disabled for the time being…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Stages The Radeon Graphics Color Management Code For Linux 6.8

Manjaro 23.1 was released overnight as the newest version of this popular Arch Linux based desktop Linux distribution…

Source: Phoronix – Manjaro 23.1 Released With Linux 6.6 LTS, Pipewire 1.0 & Desktop Updates

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems…

Source: Phoronix – Box64 v0.2.6 Brings Support For More CPU Extensions, Better Syscall Emulation

KDE developers remain very busy working toward the release of the Plasma 6 desktop in late February…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Receives Many Bug Fixes Ahead Of Christmas

As I wrote about last week that Intel’s modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it’s indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer — both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s New “Xe” Kernel Graphics Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.8

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024…

Source: Phoronix – Wine 9.0-rc2 Released With 33 More Fixes – Including Wine Wayland Fixes