ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Improving UEFI Boot, DirectX Work & NT6+ API Prep

The ReactOS project today published their latest newesletter that outlines development progress made in recent months for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows device drivers and application/user-space software...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS-November-2023

Mozilla Firefox Development Finally Moving Entirely To Git

"FIREFOX DEVELOPMENT IS MOVING FROM MERCURIAL TO GIT," began the email today from Mozilla announcing Firefox is finally shifting over to Git!..
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Going-Git

systemd 255-rc1 Brings "Blue Screen of Death" Support & New Tool To Spawn VMs

Systemd 255-rc1 is out this morning and it's packed with even more features for this dominant Linux init system and a growing list of other system utilities. Systemd 255 even is introducing systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" for displaying important error messages during boot failure, systemd-vmspawn as a new tool to spawn virtual machines, and other new features...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-255-rc1

Linux 6.7 Perf Adds Support For Zen 4 Unified Memory Controller Events

Going back to early last year saw AMD Linux engineers posting PerfMonV2 patches in preparation for Zen 4 processors. The PerfMonV2 updated performance monitoring capabilities with Zen 4 were merged last year and are supported with the latest EPYC 8004/9004 series processors. Coming only now though to Linux 6.7 is support for Unified Memory Controller (UMC) events as part o…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-Perf-Events

Open-Source AMD OpenSIL Continues Making Progress To Eventually Replace AGESA

Back at the OCP Summit in Prague earlier this year AMD detailed openSIL for advancing open-source system firmware by opening up the CPU siliccon initialization process. An update was provided at the OCP San Jose event in October around the AMD OpenSIL effort...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-OpenSIL-Autumn-2023

More FUTEX2 Bits Land In The Linux 6.7 Kernel

Last week's locking set of changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel add new interfaces for the FUTEX2 system call ABI. This work is making FUTEX2 more extendable and addressing some of the prior limitations...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-Locking-FUTEX2

Mesa 24.0 Gets Asahi AGX Gallium3D To OpenGL 3.3 For Apple Silicon Hardware

A set of 53 patches were upstreamed on Monday for syncing Mesa 24.0-devel against the latest Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver changes carried by Asahi Linux. This in turn is a big push for getting more of the open-source OpenGL functionality into Mesa for enjoying Linux on Apple M1 and M2 hardware...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.0-Asahi-OpenGL-3.3

IO_uring FUTEX Support In Linux 6.7 For A Nice Performance/Efficiency Boost

In addition to the continued FUTEX2 improvements that landed in Linux 6.7, another pull request merged last week for the new kernel bring FUTEX support to IO_uring...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/IO_uring-FUTEX-Linux-6.7

Fedora Linux 39 Released As A Wonderful Upgrade For Leading Workstations & Servers

While delayed by several weeks compared to their initial release goals, today marks the availability of Fedora 39 as a wonderful upgrade to this popular Linux distribution...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-39-Released

Ubuntu's Miriway Maturing As A Mir-Based Wayland Compositor For Other Desktops

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it's becoming iteratively more useful...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Mir-Miriway-2023

OpenZFS Lands Sync Parallelism To Drive Big Gains For Write Performance Scalability

A very enticing performance optimization was merged yesterday into the OpenZFS codebase to enhance the write performance scalability...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-Sync-Parallelism

Bcachefs Lands Big Scalability Improvement, Disables Debug Option By Default

Following last week's merging of the Bcachefs file-system into Linux 6.7, a secondary set of updates were merged today for adding a few new features as well as some fixes for this newly-merged Linux file-system...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Updated-Linux-6.7

GIMP 2.10.36 Released As GIMP 3.0 Might Finally Be Close

GIMP 2.10.36 was released on Tuesday for this long-running stable series of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative while GIMP 3.0 has been very slow to materialize...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GIMP-2.10.36-Released

New Set Of 86 Patches Overhaul The Linux Kernel's Preemption Model

Ankur Arora of Oracle on Tuesday sent out a set of 86 patches for making the Linux kernel preemptible. This is based on earlier work by prominent Linux kernel engineer Thomas Gleixner...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Overhaul-Linux-Preemptible-RFC

KDE Plasma 6.0 Alpha Released With KDE Frameworks 6 & KDE Gear Updates Too

Today marks the on-time alpha release of the "KDE 6th Megarelease" -- this encompasses the KDE Plasma 6.0 desktop, KDE Frameworks 6 libraries, and KDE Gear applications...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6-Alpha

In Development Since 2019, NetBSD 10-RC1 Released As A Huge Update

NetBSD 10 has been in development since late 2019 and the beta release is already a year old while now it's up to the release candidate phase with the availability of NetBSD 10-RC1...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-10-RC1

OpenZFS Lands Exciting RAIDZ Expansion Feature

In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-RAIDZ-Expansion

Terakan Driver Continues Working To Bring Vulkan To The Radeon HD 6000 Series

While AMD officially supports a much narrower range of more recent Radeon hardware with their official graphics drivers for Windows (and Linux - as it pertains to their Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver and AMDVLK official Vulkan driver), thanks to the open-source community around AMD's open-source driver code there are always nifty things that come…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Terakan-Does-Triangles-HD-6000

Intel Posts Latest AVX10.1-256 & AVX10.1-512 Compiler Patches For GCC

Since announcing AVX10 earlier this year, Intel compiler engineers have been quite busy preparing the open-source compiler toolchains like GCC and LLVM/Clang for this next iteration of Advanced Vector Extensions. On Thursday night the latest AVX10.1 work was posted for the GNU Compiler Collection ahead of its upcoming feature freeze...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-AVX10.1-256-512-GCC

AOMedia Announces Royalty-Free IAMF Audio Container Specification

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AOMedia-IAMF-Audio-Spec

RISC-V With Linux 6.7 Gains Optimized TLB Flushing, Software Shadow Call Stacks

In addition to the many x86/x86_64 and AArch64 improvements this round for Linux 6.7, on the RISC-V architecture side are some exciting kernel advancements too...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-RISC-V

KDE Plasma 6.0 Is Enabling Wayland By Default, Initial Support For HDR-Capable Games

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space as along with releasing Plasma 6.0 Alpha, they have also committed to shipping Plasma 6.0 with the Wayland session being enabled by default...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.0-Wayland-Default

FFmpeg 6.1 Released With Vulkan Video Decoding, VA-API AV1 Encode

While it was supposed to ship back in H1'2023, FFmpeg 6.1 finally released last night as the newest feature update to this widely-used multimedia library...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-6.1-Released

Intel Begins Sorting Out SR-IOV Support For The Xe Kernel Graphics Driver

One of the great aspects of Intel integrated and discrete graphics is the broad support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). Intel "Gen12" graphics back to Tigerlake can handle SR-IOV when there aren't any firmware woes or other issues at play. There is SR-IOV support currently with the i915 kernel driver but Intel engineers are working to architect optim…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-Driver-SR-IOV-Plans