With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation...

Ardour 8.4 was released this week as the newest update to this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux / macOS / Windows platforms...

Back in August 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced plans to open-source MoonRay as their production-grade renderer used on films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other animated films. Nearly one year ago in March 2023 MoonRay was open-sourced as OpenMoonRay while this week brings the latest iteration of it: OpenMoonRay 1.5...

The KDE Plasma 6 open-source desktop environment is launching next week and ahead of that the Slimbook V has been announced, the latest laptop crafted in partnership between the KDE project and Slimbook. This KDE-catered Linux laptop will feature the Plasma 6.0 desktop experience out-of-the-box and is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 processor...

For those in Turkey with Casper laptops or otherwise having access to that Turkish PC brand, their Excalibur line of higher-end laptops could soon see better Linux support thanks to a new WMI driver proposal...

GIMP 2.99.18 was released today as the last planned development version prior in the long road to GIMP 3.0 that has been a decade in the making for this free software Adobe Photoshop alternative...

The first "Power11" patches were queued today into the PowerPC's "next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle...

Intel has released a new version of QATlib, their user-space support library for the QuickAssist Technology (QAT) via add-in hardware and recent Xeon Scalable processors...

Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver for modern OpenGL support works on hardware going back to old Broadwell processors with "Gen8" integrated graphics as does the HasVK Vulkan driver for Haswell/Broadwell. But in allowing to focus on the common Skylake "Gen9" graphics and newer/future Intel graphics architectures, pending Mesa code is working to split-off that old Broadwell/Gen8 code. The Gen8 support will continue to be in-tree but separated from the rest of the compiler code so that the code can continue to be improved for newer Intel hardware without risking regressions/breaking those still on Broadwell era processors...

WebKitGTK as the port of the WebKit rendering engine used by GNOME Web (Epipahny) and other software for displaying web content is transitioning to using Skia for its 2D rendering...

Fraunhofer on Tuesday released their latest feature update to the Versatile Video Encoder for open-source H.266/VVC encoding...

Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs...

When it comes to today's complex RGB lighting for PC peripherals and the like it's mostly been left up to user-space. With most RGB devices interfacing via USB, it's been up to Linux user-space projects like OpenRGB, OpenRazer, etc, to implement their RGB lighting controls as needed. But as RGB lighting use continues to grow in the PC space for better or worse, there's an increasing need for a kernel API to handle complex RGB devices. Such an API is currently being devised...

As many enthusiasts wait to hear from AMD more broadly supporting ROCm in an official capacity across consumer Radeon GPUs and/or hearing about better supporting more Linux distributions outside of the major enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD announced a new medium for their communications with the community: the "New AMD ROCm Software Blog Platform" will be rolling out...

At the end of last year Intel hosted a survey of open-source developers to collect their feeback on various open-source software issues. Intel’s 2023 Open Source Community Survey is all wrapped up, the data tallied up, and the results emailed out today to participants...

The Bcachefs file-system that was mainlined to the Linux kernel last year has received a grant from the NLNet Foundation...

Earlier this month I posted some initial CPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper up against AMD EPYC Zen 4 and Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids processors. That was a very interesting battle and showed the interesting capabilities of the 72 Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. With this GPTshop.ai GH200 system actually being in workstation form, I also ran some additional benchmarks looking at the CPU capabilities of the GH200 compared to AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series workstations.

Red Hat announced today some changes to how they handle their beta releases for minor updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux...

There are some new Linux kernel patches that were posted by Intel on Monday that aim to help enhance the overall performance and power efficiency of new Meteor Lake laptop processors under Linux...

There are still no signs of a new X.Org Server feature release coming in the near-term with most of the major stakeholders divesting from the xorg-server besides the XWayland portion of the code-base. But for those interested in the past few days there have been some NetBSD/OpenBSD build fixes to the X.Org Server as well as clearing out some remnants of old compiler support...

With Valve's release today of the Steam Audio SDK 4.5.2 they have made the software development kit fully open-source under an Apache 2.0 license...

For years Wine developers have been after a better synchronization API for the Linux kernel to better match the semantics of Microsoft Windows. Posted back in January was a request for comments on an "NTSYNC" Linux kernel driver to implement Windows NT synchronization primitives for the Linux kernel. At the start of the month a post-RFC version was posted of this open-source driver and today the latest iteration of that work has been published to the kernel mailing list...

For over two years Red Hat's engineers working on the Anaconda installer have been working on a modern web-based installer UI that integrates with Cockpit and is a modern alternative to their GTK-based installer interface for deploying Fedora Linux and eventually RHEL too. The hope was to offer this web UI installer option for Fedora Workstation 40 but that's now been delayed to Fedora 41...

Following the initial AMDGPU driver updates targeting Linux 6.9 that were submitted to DRM-Next one week ago, another batch of AMDGPU feature updates were sent out today ahead of this next kernel cycle kicking off in March...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek announced the first-ever release of Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built on top of Mir...

Intel is upstreaming the necessary Lunar Lake "LNL" graphics firmware nice and early to linux-firmware.git for their "Xe2" integrated graphics...

Firefox 123.0 binaries are available today ahead of the official announcement tomorrow for this newest monthly web browser update...

Back in January 2023 was an attempt to disable kernel drivers for Microsoft's RNDIS protocol. The Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) is home to security concerns for this protocol built atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. Later in the year the effort to disable RNDIS on Linux was tried again without going mainline. In recent days it looks like there will be a fresh attempt at getting the RNDIS driver support disabled...

Posted on Sunday was the third iteration of the patches working toward the threaded/atomic non-blocking console "NBCON" support that is known to be one of the last blockers to sort out before the remainder of the Linux real-time "RT" patches can be upstreamed...

The Intel "i915" LInux kernel graphics driver has been working to wrap-up support for enabling Adaptive Sync SDP for DisplayPort (DP) for their graphics cards...

Linux 6.8-rc5 is out as the latest weekly test release of Linux 6.8 ahead of its stable debut in March...

Following the Linux reviews of the Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and Ryzen 5 8500G Zen 4 + RDNA3 desktop APUs, here is another look at these parts when making use of the lower configurable TDP options for these AM5 chips. All three of these new parts were re-tested at both 35 and 45 Watt cTDPs for seeing the impact on performance and power efficiency.