Upstreamed into the Coreboot Git repository this week is the ability to run on the MSI PRO Z790-P DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards for enjoying a latest-generation Intel desktop motherboard that is readily available as an alternative to using the proprietary BIOS implementations…

Source: Phoronix – Coreboot Lands Support For The MSI PRO Z790-P Motherboards

Mesa’s Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code for Wayland has added the “IMMEDIATE” present mode option that uses Wayland’s tearing-control unstable extension to allow for images to be presented immediately but at the risk of visible screen tearing…

Source: Phoronix – Mesa’s Vulkan WSI/Wayland Code Adds “IMMEDIATE” Present Mode Support

KDE Gear 23.08 is available today as the four-month update to this collection of KDE desktop applications…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Gear 23.08 Released With Kalendar Becoming Merkuro, Many App Improvements

While AMD has acquired a number of hardware companies in the past several years, software company acquisitions by AMD has been much more rare. This morning AMD announced the acquisition of Mipsology as an AI software company…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Acquires An AI Software Company

Seemingly for Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh processors, some new graphics PCI IDs were added today to Mesa for the Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Adds New Raptor Lake IDs To Mesa Graphics Drivers

With Ubuntu 23.10 shipping next month one of the changes expected on the desktop side was using a GIMP 3.0 snapshot for this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative rather than sticking to the aging GIMP 2.10 series. But now it’s been determined that this will not happen and GIMP 2.10 will continue to be used…

Source: Phoronix – Ubuntu 23.10 Won’t Be Shipping A GIMP 3.0 Snapshot

In addition to AMD sending out DCN 3.5 display patches for that next-gen display IP block presumably for their upcoming Ryzen 8000 series APUs, Intel’s open-source engineers today sent out the patches enabling Lunar Lake display support for their i915 kernel driver while there is also support baking for their in-development Xe kernel driver…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Brings Up Lunar Lake Display Support For Linux

Last week AMD sent out initial patches for enabling the “GFX 11.5” graphics IP under Linux for this presumed RDNA3 refresh that is likely for their next-gen Ryzen 8000 series APUs. Today AMD open-source Linux driver engineers sent out DCN 3.5 patches as an updated version of their Display Core Next IP…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Sends Out Patches Enabling New “DCN 3.5” GPU Display Block

Fedora Workstation has long maintained the QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt projects for applying a GNOME/GTK-like interface and styling to Qt applications in order to enhance the experience. However, to reduce the maintenance burden and the ongoing technical debt, Fedora Workstation 39 is planning to eliminate the custom Qt theming and just rely on Qt upstream…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora Workstation 39 Planning To Drop Custom Qt Theming

Mir 2.15 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu-focused Wayland compositor developed by Canonical that makes it easy for building out Wayland-based shells…

Source: Phoronix – Mir 2.15 Released With Cleaning Up Some APIs, Improved Alt+Tab

Googler Rob Clark on Sunday sent out the set of MSM DRM patches prepped for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. The MSM DRM driver is the kernel component for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics that goes along with the Freedreno Gallium3D and TURNIP Vulkan drivers in Mesa for having a nice Qualcomm Linux graphics stack…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 MSM DRM Driver Preps For New Hardware, Overhead Optimizations

The VK_NV_device_generated_commands_compute extension introduced in Vulkan 1.3.258 is now wired up for Mesa’s Radeon “RADV” Vulkan driver and should further benefit VKD3D-Proton for Steam Play gaming…

Source: Phoronix – RADV Implements NVIDIA DGC Compute Extension

Earlier this month when the AMD Inception CPU vulnerability was disclosed the initial mitigation was merged to Linux kernel right away for what there is referred to as the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Within a day of that code being published there were already efforts to clean it up and merged last week for Linux 6.5-rc7 was that AMD Inception code cleaning. This week a new set of 22 patches were published for further improving the AMD Inception/SRSO mitigation code…

Source: Phoronix – More Linux Fixes/Cleanups Coming For AMD Inception/SRSO Mitigation Code

QEMU 8.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack…

Source: Phoronix – QEMU 8.1 Released With New PipeWire Audio Backend, Many CPU Improvements

The AGX Gallium3D driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew for providing reverse-engineered OpenGL / GLES support on Apple Silicon M1/M2 hardware is now formally compliant with OpenGL ES 3.1…

Source: Phoronix – Asahi Linux’s Apple M1/M2 Gallium3D Driver Now OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformant

Following the news last week of Firefox outperforming Chrome in SunSpider, a Phoronix reader pointed out Mercury that is an open-source web browser claiming to be the “fastest Firefox fork” and making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and AES instructions along with compiler features like Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO). The project advertises as being 8-20% faster than upstream Firefox. Curious I ran a couple benchmarks on my end of this Firefox fork.

Source: Phoronix – Benchmarking Mercury As The “Fastest Firefox Fork” With AVX, AES, LTO + PGO

Continuing to support x86 32-bit processors with the mainline Linux kernel continues to be a maintenance burden and uncovering ugly bits of code that are seldom touched. The latest work is on fixing up the 32-bit early microcode loading code so that it’s more robust and actually correct…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Microcode Loading For x86 32-bit CPUs Being Cleaned Up & Corrected

While we are waiting on NVIDIA to roll out a beta of their next post-R535 Linux driver release stream, available today is the NVIDIA 535.104.05 Linux driver as their latest in this production driver branch…

Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA 535.104.05 Fixes An Issue Using The Open Kernel Driver With SLI

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has just released Fwupd 1.9.4 as the newest version of thus open-source software that goes along with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making it easy to deploy new firmware/BIOS updates for systems and countless peripherals under Linux…

Source: Phoronix – Fwupd 1.9.4 Released With Linux Firmware Updating For More Devices

GNOME’s Sysprof is a wonderful system-wide profiling tool for helping developers analyze bottlenecks and debug other challenging issues. This system profiler has covered both kernel and user-space but to date has not provided any insight around the CPU scheduler behavior and thus developers have had to resort to other tooling there. But for the GNOME 45 release, Sysprof has integrated CPU scheduler details…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME’s Sysprof Integrates CPU Scheduler Data