The LLVM project is now employing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) when building their x86_64 Microsoft Windows release packages. Making use of PGO is able to make their Clang build a stunning 22% faster…

Source: Phoronix – LLVM Now Using PGO For Building x86_64 Windows Release Binaries: ~22% Faster Builds

In addition to the many OpenGL and Vulkan open-source driver improvements building up for Mesa 24.0, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has also been preparing some video acceleration improvements for this next quarterly release…

Source: Phoronix – RadeonSI Gallium3D Enables VCN Encoder Intra-Refresh Support

Michal Jires of SUSE posted a new set of patches on Friday for implementing Incremental LTO support for the GNU Compiler Collection. The goal here with Incremental LTO is for reducing compile times while doing quick edit-compile cycles while employing Link-Time Optimizations…

Source: Phoronix – GCC Patches Posted For Implementing Incremental LTO

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg’s built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration…

Source: Phoronix – FFmpeg’s ffplay Media Player Adds Vulkan Renderer

Following last week’s KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha release with more enthusiasts beginning to test out the next-generation KDE desktop stack, there’s been a spike in bug reports. KDE developers are on it working to address these bugs ahead of the Plasma 6.0 stable release at the end of February…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Addressing A Spike In Bug Reports Following The Plasma 6 Alpha

A few days ago the Wine Wayland driver merged HiDPI support improvements and now for ending out the week is yet more work to land for Wine’s Wayland driver: the first bits of Vulkan enablement…

Source: Phoronix – Vulkan Support Begins Landing For Wine’s Wayland Driver

This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more…

Source: Phoronix – Valve Updates Half-Life For 25th Anniversary – Adds Official Steam Deck Support

The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Lands Vulkan Sparse Binding Support For ANV+i915 With Mesa 24.0

With the Linux 6.7 merge window having closed on Sunday, here’s a recap of all the interesting new features to find with this new kernel. Linux 6.7 stable will be out either in the final days of 2023 or more than likely in the early days of next year.

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Features Include Bcachefs, Stable Meteor Lake Graphics, NVIDIA GSP & More Next-Gen Hardware

As noted a few weeks back, NVIDIA is working to add OpenACC support to the upstream LLVM Clang compiler for this parallel computing standard. Today that work began landing in LLVM/Clang’s development codebase…

Source: Phoronix – Initial OpenACC Code Begins Landing In The LLVM Clang Compiler

Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver within Mesa has added support for the protected memory feature available with Vulkan 1.1+…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Protected Memory Support

An initial set of drm-misc-next changes has been sent out today to DRM-Next of the very first feature patches to begin queuing until the Linux 6.8 merge window opens up around the start of the new year…

Source: Phoronix – Raspberry Pi 5 Kernel Graphics Driver Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.8

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven’t yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There’s also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors…

Source: Phoronix – Louvre Is A New C++ Library Helping To Build Wayland Compositors

For those Ubuntu Linux users enjoying the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for having the very latest kernel stable point releases or being able to test daily Git kernel builds with ease or weekly RCs, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA returned this week after a month of downtime…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu’s Mainline Kernel PPA Is Back To Providing The Latest Linux Kernel Builds

Earlier this week Intel compiler engineers posted patches enabling Intel APX NDD support for the GCC compiler as the “New Data Destination” feature of the Advanced Performance Extensions. Those engineers are ending out their week by posting patches for enabling APX PPX for GCC, the new Push-Pop Acceleration of this forthcoming ISA addition…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Preparing APX PPX Support For GCC: Push-Pop Acceleration

Valve has released SteamOS 3.5.5 to its stable channel for Steam Deck users that brings Steam Deck OLED device support, HDR display settings if supported by the external display, the default color rendering for Steam Deck LCD now emulates the sRGB color gamut, and many other changes…

Source: Phoronix – SteamOS 3.5.5 Released To Stable With Steam Deck OLED Support & Many Other Changes

Ahead of AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors becoming available, Noctua recently introduced the new NH-U14S TR5-SP6 and NH-D9 TR5-SP6 heatsinks. In addition to working with the Threadripper 7000 series, these CPUs fit as well for Socket SP6 introduced with the new AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” processors. Here is a look at the cooling performance of these new Noctua TR5-SP6 heatsinks on AMD EPYC.

Source: Phoronix – Noctua NH-U14S TR5-SP6 & NH-D9 TR5-SP6 4U Great For Cooling AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” CPUs

Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has announced they’ve developed open-source Linux kernel driver support for the H.264 video encoder found with Allwinner V3, V3s, and S3 SoCs…

Source: Phoronix – Open-Source H.264 Video Encode Coming For Allwinner V3/V3s/S3 SoCs

As was expected but now made official: this year’s Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel is Linux 6.6…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Formally Becomes This Year’s LTS Kernel

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands…

Source: Phoronix – Uutils 0.0.23 Implements More GNU Coreutils Functionality In Rust