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’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

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

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed initial support for GFX11.5 “RDNA3 refresh” graphics within the RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming Mesa 23.3…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Initial Support For GFX11.5 “RDNA3 Refresh”

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

In addition to old and unmaintained Ethernet driver code set for removal, there is an effort underway to clear out some obsolete and orphaned WiFi drivers from the Linux kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Linux’s Latest Plan For Removing Old WiFi Drivers

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

Ahead of the official planned announcement for Tuesday, the Mozilla Firefox 119.0 release binaries have been published for this monthly feature update…

Source: Phoronix – Firefox 119 Available With Improved Firefox View, Expanded PDF Editing

While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn’t delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.

Source: Phoronix – Intel Continues To Demonstrate The Importance Of Software Optimizations: Clear Linux + Xeon Max Benchmarks

While most hardware vendors are relying on LLVM when it comes to offloading compute work to GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, and similar heterogeneous compute environments, right now each vendor is basically creating their own LLVM offloading run-time among a lot of other duplicated — and often downstream only — code. The new “llvm/offload” project hopes to lead to better collaboration in this area…

Source: Phoronix – LLVM Looking To Better Collaborate Around Common AI/GPU/FPGA Offloading

Following an FCV optimization for the latest Intel graphics hardware, ASTC LDR emulation, some still-pending Vulkan sparse support for ANV atop the existing i915 driver, and other recent Intel open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver optimizations, another optimization was just merged into Mesa 23.3…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Vulkan Driver Lands Optimization To Help GravityMark, Other Demanding Software

The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver within Mesa has long been focused on reverse engineering and supporting Vivante graphics IP found in various SoCs. That driver has worked out well for open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics while more recently Etnaviv has begun tackling Vivante neural processing unit (NPU) support that is beginning to be found in various SoCs…

Source: Phoronix – Etnaviv NPU Support Coming Together, Mesa Upstreaming Next

After the Raspberry Pi 5 was excitingly announced a few weeks ago, Eben Upton shared today that ramping up the production has gone better than initially anticipated and that these AArch64 single board computers are beginning to ship to customers…

Source: Phoronix – Raspberry Pi 5 Single Board Computers Begin Shipping

Linus Torvalds today released the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.6 while is hoping to release the stable kernel version next weekend…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6-rc7 Released: Linux 6.6 Final Likely Next Sunday

For those that happen to have QLogic 10Gb PCIe Ethernet adapters, the mainline Linux kernel is planning to remove this driver from the kernel source tree unless any active users step-up…

Source: Phoronix – QLogic 10Gb “QLGE” Ethernet Driver Set To Be Removed From The Linux Kernel

In addition to working on the likes of the Milk-V Duo and high-end Pioneer board, Milk-V has now announced the “Oasis” as a forthcoming mini-ITX RISC-V board that will feature 16 cores and up to 64GB of LPDDR5 system memory…

Source: Phoronix – Milk-V Oasis Sounds Like An Interesting RISC-V Board With 16 Cores, Up To 64GB LPDDR5

Linux sound patches queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle are preparing for the upcoming introduction of the new “Xe” DRM kernel graphics driver…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.7 Sound Code Prepares For Intel’s Xe DRM Driver

AMD driver engineer Saroj Kumar has contributed Perfetto integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as the latest means of allowing tracing/profiling for this open-source OpenGL driver…

Source: Phoronix – RadeonSI Driver Integrates Perfetto Support

Zlib-ng 2.1.4 was released this week as the newest version of this Zlib data compression library intended for “next generation” uses. Zlib-ng continues having a lower barrier for new contributions and optimizations than the upstream Zlib repository itself to allow for it to more rapidly evolve on today’s systems…

Source: Phoronix – Zlib-ng 2.1.4 Brings LoongArch Port, New RISC-V & ARM Optimizations

Libreboot 20231021 was published for testing today as the newest Coreboot downstream focused on providing only fully free software support for system firmware with more stringent open-source requirements than Coreboot itself…

Source: Phoronix – Libreboot 20231021 Brings Some Additional Laptops, Desktops / Motherboards For Testing