KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his newest weekly development summary as the developers work toward releasing Plasma 6.0 in February…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Lands More Power Management Tuning, Behaves Better On Btrfs File-Systems

FreeBSD 14 Beta 1 is available this weekend for helping to test out this major BSD operating system update that should debut as stable before the end of October…

Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD 14 Beta Released – Initial WiFi 6 Support, Updated LLVM Toolchain, Fwget Utility

Earlier this year I wrote about Microsoft working on their first Vulkan extension and today it finally debuted within the Vulkan 1.3.264 spec update…

Source: Phoronix – Vulkan 1.3.264 Released With Microsoft Layered Driver Extension

With the recently released Linux 6.5 kernel bringing AMD P-State EPP by default for modern Ryzen systems rather than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver, running Linux 6.5 (or newer) in various workloads can lead to improved performance and/or power efficiency. Curious about the impact on the mobile side, I recently carried out some benchmarks of the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld with AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC from Linux 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 Git kernels.

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.5+ Bringing Some Performance/Efficiency Improvements For The AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme / ASUS ROG Ally

In addition to the ASUS laptop improvements for Linux 6.6 with the ASUS-WMI driver, additional feature work is on the way for future kernel versions with one of those interesting additions being support for the ASUS Screenpad. Some higher-end ASUS laptops feature a secondary screen “screenpad” on the laptops and the pending ASUS-WMI driver patch will properly support it…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Driver Preparing Support For ASUS Screenpad On High-End Laptops

Since early this year AMD has been working on Linux enablement patches for Dynamic Boost Control (DBC). This is a new feature of some AMD SoCs that allow an “authenticated entity” to have greater control over certain SoC characteristics to improve the power/performance. AMD DBC was merged for Linux 6.6 just days ago while already new patches have been posted that extend the supported platforms for this Dynamic Boost Control functionality…

Source: Phoronix – Expanded Platform Support For AMD Dynamic Boost Control Being Worked On For Linux

While we’ve been looking forward to Bcachefs landing and carrying out a fresh round of performance testing of Bcachefs against other file-system options, it’s looking clear now that Bcachefs won’t be landing for the Linux 6.6 merge window…

Source: Phoronix – Bcachefs Looks Like It Won’t Make It For Linux 6.6

Merged on Thursday were a batch of KVM virtualization changes for the Linux 6.6 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 KVM Brings Intel & AMD Fixes, SEV-ES DebugSwap, New RISC-V Extensions

OpenZFS 2.2 has been in the works to provide Linux container support, BLAKE3 checksumming, block cloning and other new features. It’s looking like that release will be wrapped up soon while released on Thursday was v2.2-rc4 to help encourage last minute testing of this file-system driver for Linux and FreeBSD systems…

Source: Phoronix – OpenZFS 2.2-rc4 Delivers Last Minute Fixes

As a big win for Intel’s QuickAssist Technology (QAT) accelerator found as an option with Sapphire Rapids processors and prior QAT hardware, there’s been a QAT Zstd plug-in to provide big performance/efficiency benefits. Version 0.1 of that plug-in was released today…

Source: Phoronix – Intel QAT Zstd Plugin v0.1 Released For Speeding Up Zstandard Compression

Going along with KDE Plasma 6.0 releasing in early February will also be the Qt6-based KDE Gear applications and KDE Frameworks 6 happening in-sync…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Frameworks 6 & Qt6’ed Gear Apps Will Release Alongside Plasma 6.0 In February

In addition to the notable sound changes that merged last week for Linux 6.6 that included AMD VanGogh SOF support and enablement around a Valve “Galileo” device, sent in via the MFD pull request this week is work enabling the new Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 Lands Support For The Cirrus Logic CS42L43 Audio Codec

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.6 merge window were the x86 platform driver updates, which bring a few interesting Intel/AMD laptop improvements as well as a new driver to support altering select HP BIOS settings from within the confines of Linux…

Source: Phoronix – New ASUS Laptop Features & HP BIOS Settings Driver For Linux 6.6

As covered in the launch-day Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT Linux review/testing, there is already upstream open-source driver support for these new RDNA3 graphics cards in recent versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. It’s a pleasant open-source out-of-the-box experience with the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the possible exception of just needing to grab the recent AMDGPU firmware. But for those running older, enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD has now released the Radeon Software for Linux 23.20 driver package to also enable the RX 7700/7800 XT support on those enterprise operating systems…

Source: Phoronix – Radeon Software For Linux 23.20 Brings RX 7700 XT / RX 7800 XT Support

As an experimental feature for next month’s Ubuntu 23.10 release, Canonical is introducing initial support for TPM-based full disk encryption to make use of your system’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The downside though is this extra security relies on Snaps, including for the kernel and GRUB bootloader…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Adding Experimental TPM-Backed Full Disk Encryption

AMD today published version 1.2 of their Unified Inference Frontend (UIF) that is for supporting deep learning inference across AMD CPUs, GPUs, as well as Versal adaptive SoCs and FPGAs. AMD UIF aims to accelerate AI inference across all AMD compute platforms with machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow. With UIF 1.2 adds initial support for Radeon GPUs…

Source: Phoronix – AMD UIF 1.2 Released With Initial Radeon GPU Support

As part of a monthly status update concerning Plasma 6 development, KDE developer Nate Graham confirmed that the team is planning to release Plasma 6.0 in February of 2024…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6.0 Planned For Release In Early February

Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan Linux driver has landed a set of 15 patches that can further help the Linux gaming performance for those using DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Arc Graphics Enjoy Another Open-Source Vulkan Driver Performance Optimization

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support…

Source: Phoronix – OpenSSL 3.2 Alpha Released With Client-Side QUIC, Raw Public Key, SM4-XTS

Going along with the MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series, the open-source TURNIP Vulkan driver this week merged its initial support for the Adreno 700 series…

Source: Phoronix – TURNIP Vulkan Driver Lands Initial Support For Adreno A730/A740 GPUs