Tomeu Vizoso has been leading the effort for supporting Vivante’s NPU IP within the Etnaviv driver that began as a reverse-engineered driver for Vivante graphics. The Vivante NPU architecture ends up being close to the graphics cores and Vizoso has been making good progress for enabling the NPUs on this open-source stack. The latest achievement is image classification workloads now running about twice as fast as previously…

Source: Phoronix – Etnaviv NPU Open-Source Driver Now Twice As Fast For Image Classification Workloads

Distrobox 1.6 released on Sunday for this open-source project that makes it wasy to launch any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Distrobox builds upon Podman and Docker to allow creating containers of the Linux distribution of your choice and for that to integrate nicely with the host environment. With succeeding releases, Distrobox has built up quite an arsenal of features…

Source: Phoronix – Distrobox 1.6 Released For Easily Launching New Distros Within Your Terminal

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.7-rc2 as the second test release of what will become Linux 6.7 stable around the end of the calendar year…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7-rc2 Released: “Slightly Larger Than Average”

In the absence of Razer providing any official drivers and GUI control panel for Linux systems, the OpenRazer independent open-source project for crafting reverse-engineered driver support and then the likes of Polychromatic as a graphical control utility make for a pleasant Linux experience for Razer hardware on Linux. Out today is a new Polychromatic release…

Source: Phoronix – Polychromatic 0.8.3 Released For Latest Open-Source Razer Experience On Linux

Narrowly missing the Linux 6.7 merge window that closed last week is the AMD 1-Wire “AXI” driver but it’s now on tap for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year…

Source: Phoronix – AMD AXI 1-Wire Driver Queued Ahead Of The Linux 6.8 Kernel

Luc Verhaegen has announced the return of the Graphics DevRoom for FOSDEM 2024 taking place in early February in Brussels…

Source: Phoronix – Open-Source Graphics DevRoom Returning For FOSDEM 2024

The week began with Microsoft taking its Mesa Direct3D 12 code from OpenGL 4.3 to OpenGL 4.4 and then a short time after that reaching OpenGL 4.5. Microsoft now closed out the week by managing to get OpenGL 4.6 implemented atop Direct3D 12…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft Enables OpenGL 4.6 Support Over Direct3D 12

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary…

Source: Phoronix – Inkscape Celebrates 20 Years With New Release

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