The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support...

The Linux 6.8 kernel continues coming together well and the v6.8-rc6 milestone is now available for testing. If all goes well Linux 6.8 will debut as stable in two weeks but with how things are currently pacing could end up being three weeks...

WayVNC 0.8 was released this weekend as the VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC attaches to wlroots-using compositors and creators virtual input devices and exposes the display via the RFB protocol for the lack of Wayland having any standardized VNC-type support for remote/network computing...

When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver...

Intel confirmed at their MWC 2024 briefings that Granite Rapids D will debut in 2025 as the successor to Ice Lake D for Xeon D edge processors...

Longtime AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák after more than one decade working officially for AMD and years before that as an independent open-source contributor going back to the R300g days still has not run out of new performance optimizations to pursue. The most recent accomplishment for this leading Mesa contributor are some refinements to the OpenGL threading "glthread" code for lowering the memory footprint...

Released last June was the SDDM 0.20 display manager with experimental Wayland support and other enhancements after being in development for three years. Out this morning is SDDM 0.21 as another step toward SDDM 1.0 with improved Wayland support and other enhancements to this Qt-tooled display manager...

Last July AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card in China with a reduced Navi 31 GPU. Beginning tomorrow, 27 February, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is being made available worldwide. Today the review embargo expires on the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for the worldwide scope and within the US will be priced around $549 USD.

Ant Group and Alibaba have proposed PVM, the Pagetable Virtual Machine, as a new virtualization framework built upon the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. PVM does not require hardware-assisted virtualization while working with KVM-enabled software like Kata Containers...

KiCad 8.0 has been released as the latest major feature release for this open-source Electronics Design Automation (EDA) software suite. KiCad supports designing PCB layouts, provides a 3D viewer for inspecting PCBs, and other functionality...

Ubuntu/Canonical has for a while now promoted the prospects of Rust programming within the Linux kernel and one of their kernel engineers, Andrea Righi, wrote a Rust-written Linux scheduler with promising results that leverages eBPF for dynamically loading it at run-time. While Ubuntu isn't yet committing to using it as part of their distribution, appearing on the Ubuntu blog today was more praise for the work and even talking about the potential for a "micro-kernel design" in the future via leveraging Rust and eBPF...

The first release candidate of FreeBSD 13.3 is now available for testing. While FreeBSD 14 stable has been out now for months, FreeBSD 13.3 is the latest in the prior series for those continuing to rely on FreeBSD 13 in production...

It looks like AMD will soon be announcing the ROCm 6.1 update to its open-source GPU compute stack...

The Linux kernel has supported the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface "HFI" via the "intel_hfi" driver since 2022 for bettering supporting Core hybrid processors. The Intel HFI can be used for communicating performance and energy efficiency capabilities of individual CPU cores of the system. In turn the Linux kernel can leverage Intel HFI details for better task placement among the available CPU cores/threads. With a new patch series, the Intel HFI driver can "save tons of CPU cycles" by only enabling it when needed...

With the Mesa 24.1-devel Git code as of this morning, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_KHR_video_decode_av1 for Vulkan Video accelerated decoding of AV1 video content...

The Mold high performance linker has long been known for offering excellent performance over GNU Gold/ld and LLVM lld while some fresh benchmark numbers reinforce the competitive advantage that persists today for this open-source project...

Longtime Phoronix readers may recall the Libre-SoC project that for the past 5+ years has been wanting to build a libre/open-source SoC for graphics acceleration and other uses...

Ahead of this week's big KDE Plasma 6.0 release, the KWinFT project forked from the KDE KWin compositor code is re-branding as Theseus' Ship...

By default the AArch64 kernel on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions tend to default to a standard 4K page size but for newer AArch64 hardware especially in the server/HPC space, there can be great benefits to using a 64K page size. As it's been a while since I last ran any 64-bit ARM 4K vs. 64K kernel page size benchmarks, while having remote access to the NVIDIA GH200 I ran a fresh comparison for looking at the performance advantages to switching over to a 64K page size kernel. These new 64K kernel numbers are shown alongside the recent AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon CPU reference benchmark results for a look at how the 4K vs. 64K page size affects the overall computing landscape.