With KDE Plasma 6 development going well and a beta potentially in a few months, the KDE Neon Linux distribution crew has created a new archive with the latest Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 components to help developers and enthusiasts in testing out this leading-edge open-source desktop code…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Neon Experimental Lets You Run Plasma 6 With KF6 Apps Today

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes…

Source: Phoronix – FreeRDP 3.0 Beta 2 Brings More Improvements

The past several weeks at Phoronix has been very exciting with benchmarking AMD EPYC Genoa-X processors (along with Bergamo) and the incredible uplift delivered by these latest AMD server processors. But for those not yet having the opportunity to test the new EPYC Genoa-X processors locally, those wishing to evaluate the Genoa-X capabilities in the public cloud prior to making an investment in these high-end server processors with 3D V-Cache, or those simply preferring the ease of cloud infrastructure, Azure’s new HBv4 series provide an excellent route for leveraging AMD Genoa-X compute capabilities in the cloud. Here are benchmarks of the new Azure HBv4 powered by EPYC Genoa-X compared to prior Azure HPC VMs. The Azure HBv4 performance is outstanding with incredible generational uplift and leading value among Microsoft’s HPC-focused VMs.

Source: Phoronix – Azure Provides Excellent HPC Cloud Performance With HBv4 Series Powered By AMD EPYC Genoa-X

With new i915 driver code ready for the upcoming Linux 6.6, new threshold tuning around the RPS (cited as both Render P-States and Requested Power States) for some Intel graphics hardware and in some games can yield around a 10~15% boost to performance…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Graphics With Linux 6.6 Adds Tuning Knobs That Can Yield 10~15% Better Performance

SK engineer Byungchul Park noticed costly migration overhead especially with TLB shoot-downs hurting performance while he was working with Compute Express Link (CXL) on Linux. That led to some optimization patches to reduce TLB flushes under some select cases that in turn led to a 50% reduction in full flushes and has the possibility of helping performance…

Source: Phoronix – New Linux Optimization Patches Reduced TLB Flushes By Over 50% In Some Cases

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has published a lengthy blog post outlining the current state of the Plasma 6 desktop, what code porting work has wrapped up, and what major tasks remain before Plasma 6.0 can advance onto its beta and then release phase…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 6 Development Progressing Well, Plasma 6 Beta Possible In A Few Months

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve’s Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel’s ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it’s a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support…

Source: Phoronix – Fake Sparse Support Merged For Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver To Make More Games Playable

It’s been ten years since Intel launched the Haswell processors that were great for the time followed by Broadwell. On the laptop side for Haswell and Broadwell the Panel Self Refresh (PSR) power-savings support has been rather notorious at least on the Linux side. Finally for the Linux 6.6 kernel due out in late 2023, the developers are re-enabling PSR support for these aging laptops…

Source: Phoronix – With Linux 6.6, Intel Restoring Panel Self Refresh For Aging Haswell/Broadwell Laptops

An updated patch-set was sent out on Wednesday to address fixing wake-up problems for some AMD client platforms when going through a suspend/resume cycle…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Patches Updated To Fix Latest Suspend/Resume Issues For Some AMD Laptops

Another weekly batch of drm-misc-next changes were sent out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in a few weeks…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 DRM-Misc-Next Carries VirtIO Sync Objects, Other Improvements

The just-announced AMD Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 are working quite well under a fully open-source and upstream graphics driver stack. AMD is making available a new Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release for those on enterprise Linux distributions, but those living more on the leading-edge and preferring the open-source upstream Linux/Mesa driver experience, I’ve been testing these new RDNA3 professional offerings and the support is already in place and working out rather well. In this article are some initial tests of the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 as well as showing how the performance of the new packaged driver compares to that of using all open-source and upstream GPU driver components.

Source: Phoronix – AMD Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 Deliver Great Open-Source Linux Performance At Launch

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Launches The Radeon PRO W7500/W7800 RDNA3 GPUs

Intel open-source driver engineers have begun starting work on preparing the Linux graphics driver stack to ultimately handle Lunar Lake integrated graphics that is the generation following Arrow Lake…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Begins Working On “Xe2” Linux Graphics Driver Support For Lunar Lake

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribuiton that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates…

Source: Phoronix – Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distribution Adds Clippy

LibreOffice 7.6 as the next major update to this open-source office suite is due out in mud-August while today’s RC2 release serves as a last chance for testing out this updated free software alternative to Microsoft Office…

Source: Phoronix – LibreOffice 7.6 RC2 Available For Last Minute Testing Of This Open-Source Office Suite

Clément Lefèbvre shared today as part of the monthly status update for the Linux Mint project that they’ll be releasing an “EDGE” ISO to help in running this desktop Linux distribution on newer hardware…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Mint EDGE ISOs To Help With Running On Newer Hardware

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API…

Source: Phoronix – Khronos Releases ANARI 1.0 As Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine API

Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora Asahi Remix Coming For Fedora Linux On Apple Silicon Hardware

The second release candidate of XWayland 23.2 is now available that restores an earlier performance optimization around depth 24 windows…

Source: Phoronix – XWayland 23.2 RC2 Restores An Optimization For Depth 24 Windows

While Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) on Intel/AMD x86_64 processors is limited to providing one additional thread per core, SMT on IBM POWER hardware can provide 4-way and even 8-way SMT for some processor models. With Linux 6.6 the /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control interface is being extended to allow greater control over managing partial SMT states in cases of the CPUs supporting more than 2-way SMT at Linux run-time…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.6 To Make It Easier To Enable Partial SMT For POWER