The Fedora 39 Release Has Been Held Up By Raspberry Pi Bugs

Fedora 39 failed to make its “early” release target date, it didn’t meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi…

Source: Phoronix – The Fedora 39 Release Has Been Held Up By Raspberry Pi Bugs

Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops

With the new AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Zen 4 mobile processor powering the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, I was curious about the performance impact of employing full disk encryption. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost to enabling full disk encryption versus not utilizing any disk encryption while running Fedora Workstation on the new ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD laptop.

Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking The Performance Cost To Full Disk Encryption For Modern AMD Ryzen Laptops

Intel Releases OSPRay Studio 0.13 With Xe GPU Acceleration Support

Building off the recent release of OSPRay 3.0 with initial GPU acceleration support, OSPRay Studio has now been updated against this new version. As a reminder, OSPRay Studio is Intel’s open-source interactive visualization and ray-tracing application…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Releases OSPRay Studio 0.13 With Xe GPU Acceleration Support

Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora To Possibly Transition From Zlib To Zlib-NG For Better Performance

The Ongoing Work For Native Wine Wayland Support

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver…

Source: Phoronix – The Ongoing Work For Native Wine Wayland Support

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1: Polaris & Vega Support Dropped, Counter-Strike 2 Tuning

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD’s first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support…

Source: Phoronix – AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1: Polaris & Vega Support Dropped, Counter-Strike 2 Tuning

Stratis 3.6 Released For Improving Linux Storage Management

Red Hat engineers continue working on Stratis Storage as a modern Linux storage solution that leverages the Rust programming language and built atop the proven XFS file-system and LVM. Stratis continues to strive for ZFS and Btrfs like functionality although its use in the wild still seems rather limited…

Source: Phoronix – Stratis 3.6 Released For Improving Linux Storage Management

XWayland's Rootful Mode Is Becoming More Useful

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the “rootless” mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland “rootful” mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window…

Source: Phoronix – XWayland’s Rootful Mode Is Becoming More Useful

AXI 1-Wire Driver Is AMD's Latest Upstreaming Effort To The Linux Kernel

Since AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx and working to broaden the portfolio of offerings for the data center, more AMD-Xilinx drivers have been working their way toward the mainline Linux kernel. There’s been upstreaming efforts such as the Versal EDAC driver, generating DeviceTree nodes for PCI devices, Versal watchdog driver, QDMA driver, CDX bus support, and more. The latest driver working its way toward the mainline kernel from AMD is the AXI 1-wire driver…

Source: Phoronix – AXI 1-Wire Driver Is AMD’s Latest Upstreaming Effort To The Linux Kernel

The VKMS Display Driver Continues Evolving Nicely For Headless Linux Systems

The VKMS driver as a virtual kernel mode-setting solution as a software-only implementation of KMS for use with primarily headless Linux systems continues tacking on more features. MaĆ­ra Canal and Melissa Wen presented last week at XDC 2023 on the VKMS driver that continues proving very useful for headless platforms as well as for testing purposes…

Source: Phoronix – The VKMS Display Driver Continues Evolving Nicely For Headless Linux Systems

RADV Vulkan Driver Merges Cooperative Matrix Support Using RDNA3 WMMA

As yet another open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver change ahead of the upcoming Mesa 23.3 code branching and feature freeze is Vulkan VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix support with the RADV driver for RDNA3 hardware and newer using the GPU’s Wavefront Mixed-precision Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) functionality…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Vulkan Driver Merges Cooperative Matrix Support Using RDNA3 WMMA

Linux RISC-V Preparing For Real-Time Kernel Support (PREEMPT_RT)

As we approach the end of 2023, sadly, the real-time kernel “PREEMPT_RT” support still hasn’t been mainlined… The main blocker pending is still the ongoing work around non-blocking consoles / threaded console handling to then allow the few dozen remaining out-of-tree RT kernel patches to be merged. The good news is that when the PREEMPT_RT support is ready for mainline, it looks like the RISC-V architecture support will also be real-time friendly too…

Source: Phoronix – Linux RISC-V Preparing For Real-Time Kernel Support (PREEMPT_RT)

AMD Making It More Clear When Their RadeonSI OpenGL Driver Is Being Used

AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been around for a decade since the Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” graphics card days while finally the OpenGL renderer string is being changed to reflect “RadeonSI” as the name of the driver in use…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Making It More Clear When Their RadeonSI OpenGL Driver Is Being Used

Canonical To Stick With 10 Year Support Cycle For Ubuntu LTS Releases

Given recent talk of upstream Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) kernels likely being reduced from six to two year support windows moving forward, Canonical today decided to re-affirm their support for ten years of support with Ubuntu Long Term Support versions…

Source: Phoronix – Canonical To Stick With 10 Year Support Cycle For Ubuntu LTS Releases

Intel Video Acceleration Drivers Begin Preparing For Arrow Lake S

While Meteor Lake isn’t shipping until December, Intel’s open-source Linux engineers for months have already been working on 15th Gen Arrow Lake (as well as Lunar Lake, among their other processor lines) for getting the driver support in order. The latest early hardware enablement to talk about is the initial Arrow Lake S support coming to their video acceleration drivers…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Video Acceleration Drivers Begin Preparing For Arrow Lake S

Ubuntu's Mir Working On Hybrid Graphics / Multi-GPU Support

Canonical continues investing in Mir as their Wayland compositor and set of platform abstraction interfaces to make it easier for IoT and other “smart” devices to run atop Ubuntu Core. Most recently the Mir developers have been working to partially re-architect their graphics platform handling to better handle multiple GPU/display devices…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu’s Mir Working On Hybrid Graphics / Multi-GPU Support