Linux Shoots Past The 2% Threshold For The Steam Survey, AMD CPU Use Breaks 75%

When Steam on Linux debuted a decade ago it maintained around a 2% marketshare before receding and then beginning its long climb back up following the debut of Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux and then with the much anticipated Steam Deck handheld game console and the modern Arch-based SteamOS. Valve just published their May 2024 numbers for the St…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Steam-2024-Above-2

Autodafe 1.0 Released For Freeing Projects Of Autotools

Controversial free software developer Eric S Raymond has been spending a lot of time recently on the new Autodafe project as a means of free software projects from relying on Autotools. This "De-Autoconfiscation" has now led to the release of Autodafe 1.0 with the tool now being considered production-ready...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Autodafe-1.0-Released

Rust-Written Redox OS Continues Gravitating Toward The COSMIC Desktop

The Rust-written Redox OS operating system issued their May monthly status report to highlight the various improvements made to this original open-source OS...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-May-2024

Fedora Moves Ahead In Replacing Redis With Valkey

Back in April I noted that Fedora was considering replacing Redis with Valkey given the upstream Redis software licensing changes. At yesterday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they have now signed off on replacing Redis with Valkey...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Replacing-Redis-Valkey

Linux 6.11 Device Mapper Will Optimize Flushing

The latest performance optimization work for the Linux kernel's Device Mapper (DM) comes thanks to Red Hat's Mikulas Patocka...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.11-DM-Optimize-Flushing

"Honeykrisp" Is A New Vulkan Driver For Apple M1 On Linux - Derived From The NVK Driver

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver for OpenGL support with Apple Silicon on Linux has been maturing nicely and is quite capable these days, the Vulkan support hasn't been coming together as quick or for as long. But a new Apple Silicon Vulkan driver was recently started by Asahi Linux / Mesa developers and is looking positive for being able to b…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Honeykrisp-Apple-Vulkan-Driver

Libinput 1.26 Rolls Out New Features, gsetwacom Introduced To Replace xsetwacom

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer is out with two important updates to the Linux input stack: libinput 1.26 has released for this input handling library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems and then secondly he has announced the "gsetwacom" CLI program as a replacement to the "xsetwacom" program...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-1.26-Released

The Most Popular Linux Hardware Reviews & Featured Articles Over 20 Years

With this week marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, as part of the commemorative articles this week has been looking at the most popular Linux/open-source news over 20 years. In the piece today is looking back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and other featured articles on Phoronix since 2004...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Hardware-Reviews-20

Google Begins Upstreaming Fuchsia OS Support Into Mesa 3D

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fuchsia-OS-Simple-Mesa-Support

Redox OS With COSMIC Apps Is Looking Quite Nice

Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Redox-OS-COSMIC-Look

AMD's Newest Open-Source Surprise: "Peano" - An LLVM Compiler For Ryzen AI NPUs

There was a very exciting Friday evening code drop out of AMD... They announced a new project called Peano that serves as an open-source LLVM compiler back-end for AMD/Xilinx AI engine processors with a particular focus on the Ryzen AI SOCs with existing Phoenix and Hawk Point hardware as well as the upcoming XDNA2 found with the forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series.…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Peano-LLVM-Ryzen-AI

Mold 2.32 Released With Increased LLVM LLD Compatibility, Faster Identical Code Folding

Mold 2.32 is out as the newest feature release for this high speed code linker that rivals LLVM LLD and GNU Gold...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-2.32-Released

Intel In-Tree Linux Network Drivers Being Adapted To Support Firmware Updates

Intel's IGB and IXGBE network drivers within the mainline Linux kernel are being adapted to support firmware updates for the underlying driver. To date such functionality was limited to Intel's out-of-tree versions of these drivers for their higher-end network hardware...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGB-IXGBE-Firmware-Update

Arch Linux Powered CachyOS Now Defaults To Btrfs Rather Than XFS

Arch Linux derivative CachyOS that is optimized for a nice desktop experience and shipping a nice set of performance optimizations/tuning by default is out with its June 2024 refresh...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/CachyOS-Btrfs-Default

The Two Year Journey Funded By Arm/Qualcomm For Improving ARM Linux Laptop Support

Kernel developer and consultant Johan Hovold spent the last two years working on improving ARM Linux laptop support with a particular focus on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s powered Qualcomm SoC. Arm funded this Linaro effort and as a result the ThinkPad X13s enjoys pleasant upstream kernel support now. This Arm Linux laptop project has now concluded but se…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Two-Years-Improving-ARM-Laptops

KDE Receives New Human Interface Guidelines For 2024

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham has been working with various KDE designers and developers to establish a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG)...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-New-HIG-2024

GNOME Papers Document Viewer Making Progress As GTK4-Based Evince Fork

GNOME's longtime document viewer, Evince, was recently forked as GNOME Papers and saw its first release a few weeks back. This new GNOME document viewer has been ported from GTK3 to GTK4 and also brings an improved user interface and other refinements...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Papers-GTK4-Evince-Fork

RKVDEC2 Driver Posted For Accelerated Video Decoding On Newer Rockchip SoCs

For years there has been the RKVDEC Linux media driver to provide accelerated video decoding on Rockchip SoCs. Being worked on now is RKVDEC2 for providing video decoding on the newer Rockchip SoCs...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/RKVDEC2-Rockchip-Video-Decode

VMware Hypercall API To Likely Land In Linux 6.11

For months Broadcom has been working on the VMware Hypercall API for the Linux kernel. This "vmware_hyperscall" is a new family of functions for use by the VMware guest code and virtual device drivers in an architecture-independent manner...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/VMware-Hypercall-API-Linux-6.11

IceWM 3.6 Released With A Few New Features & Fixes

IceWM 3.6 is out today as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/IceWM-3.6-Released

NumPy 2.0 Brings Faster Performance Thanks To Intel's x86-simd-sort & Google's Highway

NumPy 2.0 was released on Sunday that's been in the making for the past year and their first major release since 2006. While it comes with API/ABI breakage, NumPy 2.0 delivers new features and performance improvements...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NumPy-2.0-Released

Fedora 41 Looks To Offer A KDE Plasma Mobile Spin

Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn's Fedora 41 release...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-KDE-Mobile-Proposal

X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit v0.0.2 Adds NetBSD & FreeBSD Support

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Testing-Ground-0.0.2

Fedora 41 To Replace Power-Profiles-Daemon With "Tuned"

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-Goes-Tuned-PPD

Zlib-ng 2.2 Speeds Up Compression By ~12% On x86_64 CPUs

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/zlib-2.2-RC1

GNOME Merges Wayland DRM Lease Protocol For Better VR Handling

Merged today into GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol to allow for nice virtual reality (VR) headset support for GNOME on Wayland...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Wayland-DRM-Lease

Raspberry Pi 5 Kernel Graphics Driver Support Will Hopefully Be Upstreamed Soon

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel g…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-Kernel-DRM-Soon

Intel Linux NPU Driver v1.5 Released - Now Validated On Arrow Lake & Lunar Lake

Intel on Wednesday released version 1.5 of their Linux NPU driver, their user-space driver component for Linux systems in enabling the neural processing unit found with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors and newer. This goes along with their upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for allowing a full open-source solution for AI workloads with the likes of Op…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-NPU-Driver-1.5

Cloud Hypervisor 40 Released With Better Boot Time Performance

Cloud Hypervisor 40.0 is out today for this open-source Rust-written VMM that started off as an Intel software project and evolved into a multi-vendor initiative with backing from the likes of Microsoft, Arm, AMD, and others for a cloud-focused, security-critical virtualization hypervisor...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cloud-Hypervisor-40-Released

AMD AI Compiler Engineer Lands A Generic MLIR To SPIR-V Pass In LLVM 19

Merged on Friday to LLVM 19 Git is a generic MLIR to SPIR-V pass for lowering the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation down into SPIR-V as the intermediate representation consumed by OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan drivers...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-19-MLIR-To-SPIR-V

Flathub Has Now Served More Than Two Billion Downloads For Flatpaks

Flathub as the centralized repository for serving Flatpak sandboxed Linux applications crossed the threshold this weekend of serving more than two billion downloads...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Flathub-Two-Billion-Downloads

OpenShot 3.2 Released With Better Performance For This Open-Source Video Editor

OpenShot 3.2 has been released as the latest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editor that is popular on Linux systems...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenShot-3.2-Released

Rust-Written OpenCL Driver Now Works On Raspberry Pi GPUs

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a Rust-based OpenCL driver for GPUs backed by Gallium3D support now works with the Broadcom V3D driver. This V3D support is notable as it's most commonly associated with the Raspberry Pi single board computers...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rusticl-V3D-OpenCL-Raspberry-Pi

Arch Linux Installer "Archinstall" 2.8.1 Adds Experimental LVM Support

Archinstall 2.8.1 is now available for the newest version of this easy-to-use, command-line driven installer for the Arch Linux operating system...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Archinstall-2.8.1-Released

AMD's AOMP 19.0-2 Compiler Brings Zero-Copy For CPU-GPU Unified Shared Memory

AMD compiler engineers have released AOMP 19.0-2 as the newest version of their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler that carries all of their latest work around OpenMP/AOCC GPU device offloading to Radeon and Instinct hardware. With this updated AOMP compiler is now run-time support for zero-copy with CPU-GPU unified shared memory and various other new features for th…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-AOMP-19.0-2-Compiler

AMD P-State Core Performance Boost To Be Merged For Linux 6.11

Linux 6.11 is shaping up to be an exciting summertime kernel cycle for AMD Ryzen owners. The newest feature now being queued ahead of next month's merge window is Core Performance Boost support within the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Core-Perf-Boost-Linux-6.11

Shotcut 24.06 Supports SVT-AV1 Encode & AVIF Images, Many Fixes

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Shotcut-24.06-Video-Editor

SUSE's "Agama" OS Installer Rolls Out New Web UI, Better Auto Installations

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/openSUSE-Agama-9-Installer

Servo Web Engine Gets WebGPU Running On OpenGL ES & Other New Features

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-June-2024-Update

KDE Developers Fix More Bugs For Plasma 6.1, Begin More Feature Work On Plasma 6.2

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-This-Week-6.1-Fixes

Niri 0.1.7 Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Adds Fractional Scaling

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Niri-0.1.7-Released

GNOME Ends Out June With New Libadwaita Addition, Optional Building Without X11

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-End-Of-June-2024

Chrome's Coreboot Firmware Adapting For 64-bit Boot, Prepping For Intel Panther Lake

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake gene…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-64-bit-Firmware-Adapt