There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward…

Source: Phoronix – Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future

A change merged to the X.Org Server Git for the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver is helping conserve some power consumption at least for Intel graphics by determining the optimal hardware cursor size…

Source: Phoronix – xf86-video-modesetting Driver Optimization Helps Conserve Intel Power Consumption

On Friday in addition to Intel submitting their new Xe kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.8, the red team sent in their latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes ahead of this next kernel cycle. Exciting on the AMD side is landing the AMD color management properties support! But on the downside, it’s compile-time disabled for the time being…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Stages The Radeon Graphics Color Management Code For Linux 6.8

Manjaro 23.1 was released overnight as the newest version of this popular Arch Linux based desktop Linux distribution…

Source: Phoronix – Manjaro 23.1 Released With Linux 6.6 LTS, Pipewire 1.0 & Desktop Updates

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems…

Source: Phoronix – Box64 v0.2.6 Brings Support For More CPU Extensions, Better Syscall Emulation

KDE developers remain very busy working toward the release of the Plasma 6 desktop in late February…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Receives Many Bug Fixes Ahead Of Christmas

As I wrote about last week that Intel’s modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it’s indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer — both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s New “Xe” Kernel Graphics Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.8

Wine 9.0-rc2 is now available as the latest weekly release candidate on the road to the stable Wine 9.0 release in early 2024…

Source: Phoronix – Wine 9.0-rc2 Released With 33 More Fixes – Including Wine Wayland Fixes

Earlier this month at AMD’s AI event in San Francisco they announced ROCm 6.0 while launching the MI300X and MI300A accelerators. While announced back on the 6th, today marks the actual availability of ROCm 6.0 with the source code and binaries now publicly available…

Source: Phoronix – AMD ROCm 6.0 Now Available To Download With MI300 Support, PyTorch FP8 & More AI

A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn’t want to develop a new terminal becase “creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days.” Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME Gets A New Terminal Choice: Prompt

With Intel’s just-launched 5th Gen Xeon “Emerald Rapids” processors headlined by the 64-core Xeon Platinum 8592+, one of the key upgrades with these new server processors is now supporting DDR5-5600 memory compared to DDR5-4800 with Sapphire Rapids and also the memory frequency limit with AMD’s EPYC Zen 4 processors. Here are some benchmarks of the flagship Xeon Platinum 8592+ when being tested with DDR5-4800 versus DDR5-5600 memory modules.

Source: Phoronix – Intel 5th Gen Xeon Performance Benchmarks With DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-5600

While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven’t been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment…

Source: Phoronix – Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor & Multi-Window Support

A quirk has been discovered with the AMD-powered Framework 13 inch laptop where if a user closes the laptop’s lid on an already-suspended system, the system will wake up. A set of Linux kernel patches are on the way to workaround this issue…

Source: Phoronix – Framework 13 AMD Workaround Prepared For Linux To Deal With A Suspend Issue

Intel’s VC Intrinsics software package that provides a set of intrinsics atop the LLVM IR instructions to represent SIMD semantics for programs targeting Intel GPUs has been updated for new hardware support…

Source: Phoronix – Intel VC-Intrinsics Updated With Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake & XeHPCVG Support

Tim Holmes-Mitra with Canonical has shared some roadmap highlights for the Ubuntu desktop with the in-development Ubuntu 24.04 LTS…

Source: Phoronix – Canonical Details Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop Plans + Ongoing X11 Sunsetting Discussions

While some at Intel were busy launching the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable “Emerald Rapids”, other Linux engineers at the company were pushing ahead on their new hardware enablement quest for future platforms. Sent out on the same day as Emerald Rapids being announced were continued patches for enabling Grand Ridge…

Source: Phoronix – The Intel_Idle Linux Driver Prepares For Grand Ridge SoCs

In addition to Fedora 40 applying systemd hardening settings to bolster system security, another security enhancement now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is on having the linker error out on encountering possible security issues…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40’s Linker Will Now Error Out On Security Issues

It’s been two weeks since Mesa 23.3 was punctually released and this week has been succeeded by the Mesa 23.3.1 point release with the first batch of bug/regression fixes…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa 23.3.1 Rolls Out Fixes From D3D12 To RADV

Fedora 40 is planning to provide more hardened system security by leveraging some high level security features provided by systemd…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40 To Apply Systemd Security Hardening

Back in September AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) and at the time they noted the open-source code would be made available “soon”. As a nice Christmas present, the FSR3 source code is public as of today…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Publishes FSR 3 Source Code