Svobodný software

The past few months have seen patches for updating the XZ (de)compression code within the Linux kernel that's been a lengthy process in part due to the XZ backdoor situation earlier this year and the reputable XZ developers in turn being busy cleaning up that mess. In any event it appears that the updated XZ code for the Linux kernel is now on track for mainlining come Linux 6.12...

Colors within the GTK toolkit have been represented to date using sRGB but developers have been working on supporting other color spaces like Display-P3 and BT.2100-PQ as they work to better support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays on the Linux desktop...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.11-rc3 a few minutes ago as the latest weekly release candidate...

Motherboard vendors have begun releasing updated BIOS versions for Intel Core 13th/14th Gen motherboards that offer the new "0x129" CPU microcode that is intended to address the Raptor Lake stability issues that have been causing instability problems and crashing errors for a growing number of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen processors. Intel reported in their (Windows) testing that the 0x129 CPU microcode should offer negligible performance impact but I was curious to run my benchmarks under Linux of this new CPU microcode.

Since the release of FFmpeg 6.1 last year there has been accelerated Vulkan Video decoding support while being merged to FFmpeg Git this weekend is the Vulkan Video encode support...

Nearly three years in the making, the ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 protocols have been merged into the Wayland Protocols repository for vastly improving screen capture support on the Wayland desktop...

There's a new release of NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland project for an EGL External Library Platform library implementing EGL on top of EGLDevice and EGLStream extensions. This week's NVIDIA EGL-Wayland 1.15 release is primarily centered on delivering Wayland explicit sync fixes...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.15, Wine-Staging 9.15 is now available with 376 patches currently being applied atop the upstream codebase...

NVIDIA software engineer Andrea Righi has implemented his "scx_rustland" Linux Rust scheduler within eBPF for very promising performance results...

Wine 9.15 is out this Saturday as the newest bi-weekly development release for enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and other environments...

Niri as a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM is out with a new feature release. Niri 0.1.8 is the new release out today and it also marks the project's one year birthday...

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that details the latest improvements being made thanks to their Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) funding along with other development efforts squeezing into next month's GNOME 47 desktop release...

Well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák continues relentlessly optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and related code for ensuring the AMD graphics stack can reach peak performance...

KDE developers remain very busy this summer working toward the Plasma 6.2 release with exciting new features...

Last week I wrote about a tiny Linux patch yielding up to 32% faster performance and up to 18% less energy for Emerald Rapids CPUs. That patch is an adjustment to the Intel P-State driver's Energy Performance Preference (EPP) value for that Intel Xeon Scalable family. Today that patch was merged for the Linux 6.11 kernel...

A number of Phoronix readers have been requesting a fresh re-test of the experimental Bcachefs file-system against other Linux file-systems on the newest kernel code. Your wish has been granted today with a fresh round of benchmarking across Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS using the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel. This round of testing was carried out on the newly-released Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs that offer very speedy performance for modern Linux desktops and servers.

Submitted for DRM-Next last week with intentions of getting it into the Linux 6.12 kernel was a new DRM "power saving policy" property. The intent was for this new monitor/display connector property to indicate whether power saving features should be used that could compromise the experience intended by the desktop compositor. But one week later this property is now set to be removed as it's been deemed immature...

A Qualcomm engineer has posted the Linux kernel patches for adding the DeviceTree to support the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 devices powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 SoCs. This allows Linux to run on these new Snapdragon X1-powered Microsoft laptops but as with the other devices there are a number of support caveats that for most end-users will be a showstopper...

For those making use of the EROFS read-only file-system designed with mobile/embedded devices and containers in mind, EROFS-UTILS 1.8 is now available as an important update for these user-space utilities...

The Linux kernel itself can already boot quite fast but with a simple one-line patch another ~0.035 seconds will be able to be shaved off the boot time...