Linux

Microsoft Continued With Many Linux & Open-Source Announcements In 2024
This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintena...
2024-12-31 09:50
Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops
It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its lates...
2024-12-31 07:20
AMD INVLPGB Linux Patches Updated For Broadcast TLB Invalidation
Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indica...
2024-12-31 07:01
Mesa Saw Fewer Patches This Year But Valve's Contributions Took The Top Spot
While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, i...
2024-12-31 06:48
Clang 20 Compiler Adds Support For Xtensa CPU Target
Back in early 2023 an Xtensa back-end was added to LLVM for the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa IP. Xtensa is used for DSPs, micro-controllers, and this 32-bit RISC architecture is also used for other hardware like data processing engines. Two years after the...
2024-12-31 06:33
FreeBSD Collaborating With AMD, NetBSD 10.0 Release & Other BSD Highlights Of 2024
While predominantly covering Linux-related news and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix, the BSDs hold a special spot. Here's a look back at some of the most exciting BSD milestones and FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD project news of 2024...
2024-12-31 06:15
Kdenlive is Adding One of Final Cut Pro’s Best Features
Removing backgrounds from video in Kdenlive, the free, open-source video editor for Linux, macOS and Windows, is about to get a whole lot easier. This “modern background removal tool” uses object masks to automatically cut out the subject of a vide...
2024-12-31 03:54
Meet Orbit, Mozilla’s AI Assistant Extension for Firefox
Orbit by Mozilla is a new AI-powered assistant for the Firefox web browser that makes summarising web content while you browse as easy as clicking a button. After all, why read an article to understand what it says when you can read an AI summary rephr...
2024-12-30 23:24
Xfce 4.20, COSMIC Alpha & LXQt 2 Led Alternative Open-Source Desktops In 2024
In addition to all the GNOME advancements and KDE excitement with shipping Plasma 6 this year, other alternative open-source desktop environments enjoyed much success too this year... System76's Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment for their Pop!_OS L...
2024-12-30 20:25
Deadline Scheduling Policy Being Experimented With For Linux Graphics Drivers
Tvrtko Ursulin with Igalia sent out a "request for comments" patch series today working on a deadline scheduling policy for the DRM scheduler that is used across different Direct Rendering Manager kernel graphics drivers...
2024-12-30 15:04
Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC
As part of my end-of-year benchmarking and various historical comparisons, over the holidays I was curious to take a look at how the mature AMD EPYC 9004 "Genoa" performance has evolved over the past two years under Linux. Going off benchmarks I ran ba...
2024-12-30 12:30
Cloudflare Makes Open-Source h3i For HTTP/3 Testing & Debugging
Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...
2024-12-30 11:27
9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: December 29th, 2024
The 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for December 29th, 2024, brings news about postmarketOS 24.12, Mixxx 2.5, siduction 2024.1.0, 4MLinux 47.0, Amarok 3.2, Serpent OS Alpha, as well as all the latest distro and software updates. The post 9to5Linux Weekly Roun...
2024-12-30 11:11
Mesa's Terrific Year With Better Vulkan Ray-Tracing, NVK Progress & Same-Day Vulkan 1.4
The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 s...
2024-12-30 09:00
System insights with command-line tools: lslogins and lsmod
Continuing our exploration of commands that provide insights into the inner workings of your Fedora Linux system, we turn our focus to more simple ones like lslogins and lsmod. These tools offer information about user accounts and kernel modules, respe...
2024-12-30 08:00
RadeonSI Driver Now Uses ACO By Default For Pre-RDNA GPUs
As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
2024-12-30 06:50
Updated Serpent OS Alpha Brings Few Fixes To This Original Linux Distribution
Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution...
2024-12-30 06:38
AMD's GPUOpen Vulkan Memory Allocator Now Supports Vulkan 1.4
AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resou...
2024-12-30 06:26
xxHash 0.8.3 Brings Runtime Vector Extension Handling For x86/x86_64
Meta's Yann Collet of Zstd fame is rounding out 2024 by releasing xxHash 0.8.3 as the newest update to this extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm. The xxHash fast hash algorithm pushes for RAM speed limits and with the v0.8.3 update brings mo...
2024-12-30 06:17
GNOME’s New Image Viewer Adds Image Editing Features
Loupe (aka Image Viewer) is GNOME’s modern successor to the venerable Eye of GNOME has picked up its first batch of image editing features. The features in question were only recently merged upstream, aren’t finished, and not yet included in a stab...
2024-12-30 01:44