OpenSUSE is now providing builds of openSUSE Tumbleweed and microOS that are making use of systemd-boot as its bootloader rather than GRUB and also leveraging full disk encryption via systemd…

Source: Phoronix – openSUSE Tumbleweed Trying Out systemd-boot & systemd Full Disk Encryption

The Bcachefs file-system has landed some additional fixes ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.7 stable release…

Source: Phoronix – Bcachefs Lands More Fixes Ahead Of Linux 6.7 Stable Debut

Back in January I wrote about Intel working on a Timed I/O driver for Linux with PPS (Pulse Per Second) to help with time synchronization between multiple devices. There hasn’t been much external talk about this Timed I/O / PPS functionality while today as we approach the end of the year a new set of Linux kernel patches were posted for wiring up this Intel PPS Generator functionality…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Revises Work On Timed I/O PPS Functionality For Linux

Among the newly-proposed features for Fedora 40 is enabling WiFi MAC address randomization by default to yield better user privacy…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40 Looks To Utilize WiFi MAC Address Randomization For Better Privacy

Intel’s new Xe kernel graphics driver is set for merging into Linux 6.8 as an experimental option. While it’s being added to the next kernel cycle, it’s not yet used by default for any existing Intel GPUs and its features have yet to be fully implemented and the performance has yet to be fully optimized. Among the features currently missing is Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support but a patch series posted today aims to address that functionality…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Posts SVM Patches For Xe Kernel Graphics Driver

With AI being all the rage these days and each vendor working on getting their wares to market with AI acceleration, besides Intel now having out their Meteor Lake CPUs that feature their Intel AI Boost (NPU), Intel is rather positioned well with their prolific open-source software contributions. One of the AI-related software contributions over the past week has been improvements to the FFmpeg multimedia library’s “DNN detect” filter for object detection within videos…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Improves FFmpeg’s DNN Detect Filter For AI Object Detection

GRUB 2.06 was released back in June of 2021 and today it’s finally been succeeded by… GRUB 2.12. This latest GRUB stable release has been a long time coming but it’s finally out before the new year and it’s packing many features for this widely-used open-source bootloader…

Source: Phoronix – GRUB 2.12 Bootloader Brings SDL2 Support, Boot Loader Interface

For those with some extra time on your hands around the holidays, the second beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop along with KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6.0 is now available for testing…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6 Beta 2 Released For Testing

Yesterday I posted the first Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarks that were focused on the CPU capabilities with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Ubuntu Linux compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. The strictly CPU core performance ended up being rather disappointing with the AMD Zen 4 laptop dominating in most cases at similar or better power efficiency. But where things become much more interesting — and competitive — with Meteor Lake is on the integrated graphics side now featuring Arc Graphics. The benchmarks today is our first look at the new Meteor Lake Arc Graphics with the Core 7 Ultra 155H while comparing it to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the prior generation Intel integrated graphics.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Meteor Lake Arc Graphics: A Fantastic Upgrade, Battles AMD RDNA3 Integrated Graphics

The first beta of the Qt 6.7 toolkit is now available for some holiday-time testing…

Source: Phoronix – Qt 6.7 Beta Released With Variable Font Support & QRhiWidget Class

With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has “almost full support” with the upstream Linux kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support

Ikey Doherty who is known for his work starting Solus Linus as well as the Budgie desktop while also formerly working on Intel’s Clear Linux and other open-source software contributions has most recently been working on his newest endeavour: Serpent OS. A end-of-year development summary has now been posted that outlines the latest work on this Linux distribution…

Source: Phoronix – Ikey Doherty’s Serpent OS Continues Building Up Its Rust Infrastructure

QEMU 8.2 has been released as the newest update for this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role within the open-source Linux virtualization stack…

Source: Phoronix – QEMU 8.2 Released With New VirtIO-Sound & VirtIO-GPU “Rutabaga” Devices

A new version of Sound Open Firmware is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware and development tools. For what began as an Intel open-source project for open-source sound firmware is now seeing ongoing adoption by AMD, MediaTek, and other vendors. Sound Open Firmware 2.8 has been released ahead of the holidays…

Source: Phoronix – Sound Open Firmware 2.8 Released With New Intel & AMD Bits

It’s just not old wired and wireless networking drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel but as part of some winter-time cleaning a set of patches have been posted that would remove much of the remaining SPARC32 support for old 32-bit Sun workstations…

Source: Phoronix – The Linux Kernel Looks To Drop Much Of The Remaining SPARC 32-bit CPU Support

Last week Intel launched their Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” notebook processors. Genuinely very curious about the performance potential under Linux along with various features of these new mobile SoCs like the NPU and integrated Arc Graphics, I bought an Intel Core Ultra laptop on launch-day for carrying out Linux benchmarks. In this first review of Intel Meteor Lake on Linux is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H performs against the common AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as the Zen 4 laptop competition.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 7840U On Linux In 300+ CPU Benchmarks

The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora Asahi Remix 39 Released For Apple Silicon Macs

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this “Portable Computing Language” implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems…

Source: Phoronix – PoCL 5.0 Released With Transparent OpenCL Over Networked Systems Capability

As what’s likely to be the last Vulkan API spec update before Christmas, Vulkan 1.3.274 was released today with the Vulkan Video encode extensions promoted as well as adding some other new extensions as a nice end-of-year gift…

Source: Phoronix – Vulkan 1.3.274 Released With Video Encode Extensions Promoted

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle…

Source: Phoronix – The Mainline Linux Kernel To Finally Support The Google Tensor GS101 SoC & Pixel 6