Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I’ve been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Open-Source Compute Runtime Performing Increasingly Well Against NVIDIA’s Proprietary Linux Driver

The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged…

Source: Phoronix – Servo Web Engine Made Some Nice Progress In October

Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME’s Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver…

Source: Phoronix – Experimental Zero-Copy Support For Nouveau With GNOME Mutter

Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year’s KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the “Recent Files” search area…

Source: Phoronix – File Searching On KDE Plasma 6.0 To Use Less CPU Resources & Better Usability

Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year…

Source: Phoronix – Blender 4.1 To Support Cycles Renderer On AMD RDNA3 APUs

Shortly after today’s Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter’s feature series…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.3-rc1 Available For Testing With NVIDIA Vulkan Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

For those wishing to interact with Steam from virtual reality (VR) headsets, today Valve promoted SteamVR 2.0 to stable…

Source: Phoronix – SteamVR 2.0 Officially Released With Many Improvements

Mesa 23.3 has now been branched in Git and in turn that opens up the mainline code to beginning feature work on what will become Mesa 24.0 when it releases in Q1’2024…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 24.0 Enters Feature Development For Open-Source OpenGL & Vulkan Drivers

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

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

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 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

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 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

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

The X.Org Server and XWayland saw new point releases today as a result of three more security vulnerabilities being disclosed…

Source: Phoronix – XWayland & X.Org Server See New Releases Due To Three More Security Vulnerabilities

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

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 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. Maíra 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

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