Phoronix

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Phoronix: news regarding free and open-source software



Rusticl vs. Intel Compute Runtime Performance For OpenCL On Battlemage

([Display Drivers] 1 Minute Ago Add A Comment)

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks of Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver against AMD ROCm on Strix Halo. Those benchmarks caught many by surprise with how well that Rust-based open-source OpenCL driver was working on AMD GPUs for being a generic OpenCL implementation built atop Mesa's Gallium3D. For those curious about the potential of Rusticl on the Intel graphics side, here are some Battlemage benchmarks for Rusticl up against Intel's official Compute Runtime driver stack.



FFmpeg Integrates Video Encoder For Advanced Professional Video (APV)

([Multimedia] 5 Minutes Ago APV Encoder)

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.



AWS Graviton4 96-Core Performance vs. AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon CPUs

([Processors] 1 Minute Ago)

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.



Wayfire 0.10 Wayland Compositor Brings Experimental Vulkan Rendering

([Wayland] 7 Hours Ago Wayfire 0.10)

Wayfire 0.10 was released this week and its integration with the underlying wlroots rendering code has been overhauled. In turn this opens up Wayfire to having experimental support for rendering using the Vulkan API.



bsd-user-4-linux Lets FreeBSD Binaries Run Unmodified On Linux

([BSD] 8 Hours Ago FreeBSD Q2-2025)

The FreeBSD project on Friday published their quarterly status report to highlight all of the interesting changes for Q2'2025. Among the recent FreeBSD efforts have been on "bsd-user-4-linux" to allow FreeBSD binaries to run unmodified on Linux systems. FreeBSD is also coming up with a policy around AI/LLM usage for contributing to the project. Additionally, Sylve is taking shape as a new web-based unified system management platform for FreeBSD systems.



DXVK 2.7.1 Delivers Improved Performance For Some Direct3D 9 Titles

([Valve] 11 Hours Ago DXVK 2.7.1)

Philip Rebohle working for Valve just released DXVK 2.7.1 as the newest version of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan API translation layer. DXVK 2.7.1 enables yet more games to correctly render now with DXVK on Linux.



GTK 4.20 Released With Better Wayland Support, Rendering Enhancements

([GNOME] 12 Hours Ago GTK 4.20)

GTK 4.20 released on Friday as the newest version of this open-source toolkit aligned with the GNOME project. GTK 4.20 brings improved support for Wayland on Linux along with platform enhancements for macOS, Android, and Windows too.



KDE Addresses A 22 Year Old Feature Request For Its Clipboard

([KDE] 12 Hours Ago KDE Plasma Clipboard)

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed.



WIne 10.14 Ships With Updated Mono, VKD3D 1.17 & Ping Support For IPv6

([WINE] 29 August 08:24 PM EDT Wine 10.14)

Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.



Btrfs Developer Josef Bacik Leaving Meta & Stepping Back From Kernel Development

([Linux Storage] 29 August 04:01 PM EDT Josef Bacik)

Josef Bacik who is a long-time Btrfs developer and active co-maintainer alongside David Sterba is leaving Meta. Additionally, he's also stepping back from Linux kernel development as his primary job.



GNOME Executive Director Steps Down After Four Months

([GNOME] 29 August 03:46 PM EDT Steven Deobald)

It was barely four months ago that the GNOME Foundation announced its new Executive Director, Steven Deobald, who was taking over afterHolly Million stepped down after less than one year. Today Deobald announced he is stepping down as the Executive Director.



Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs As Now "Externally Maintained"

([Linux Storage] 29 August 02:26 PM EDT Bcachefs Externally Maintained)

Linus Torvalds has finally come to a decision following his plans to part ways with the Bcachefs file-system and then not merging any Bcachefs updates for Linux 6.17.



Fwupd 2.0.14 Brings New Framework & SteelSeries Hardware Support

([LVFS] 29 August 08:12 AM EDT Fwupd 2.0.14)

Fwupd 2.0.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source firmware updating utility that is widely-used on Linux systems for BIOS/system firmware updates as well as an ever increasing array of different peripheral devices.



Switching From i915 To Xe Linux Drivers Can Yield Some Big Gains For Intel Arc A-Series

([Display Drivers] 29 August 06:36 AM EDT 20 Comments)

For those using Intel Arc A-Series graphics cards on Linux, the i915 kernel driver remains the default but switching over to the Xe driver can yield some incremental performance benefits. For OpenCL / GPU compute workloads especially, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be rather dramatic.



Qualcomm Packet Processing Engine "PPE" Going Upstream For Linux 6.18

([Linux Networking] 29 August 04:51 AM EDT Qualcomm PPE)

Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs.



Genode OS 25.08 Introduces New Kernel Scheduler, Updates Linux Drivers

([Operating Systems] 29 August 04:32 AM EDT Genode OS Framework 25.08)

Version 25.08 of the Genode OS Framework has been released for this open-source operating system framework designed for software safety and security.



Armbian 25.8.1 Brings Expanded Board Support, Linux 6.16 Option For Many Boards

([Operating Systems] 29 August 04:14 AM EDT Armbian 25.8.1)

Armbian 25.8.1 is now available as a significant update over the Armbian 25.5 release for this Debian-based Linux distribution focused on offering broad support for ARM64 and RISC-V single board computers as well as other devices.



OBS Studio 32 Beta Introduces A Plugin Manager, Hybrid MOV Support

([Multimedia] 29 August 03:59 AM EDT OBS Studio 32)

Released overnight in beta form is OBS Studio 32.0, the next feature release for this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform application for desktop streaming/recording.



Linux 6.17 Showing Off Some Nice Gains For 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" Performance

([AMD] 28 August 04:37 PM EDT Linux 6.17)

Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.15 LTS through Linux 6.17 Git kernel performance using the latest stable and development kernels compared to the Long Term Support (LTS) kernels over the past four years. For having hardware support back to Linux 5.15 I was using an AMD EPYC Milan-X server. In those benchmarks there were some nice gains and even from Linux 6.16 to 6.17 Git was around a 3% geo mean improvement. So I was curious to run some benchmarks on the latest-generation AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors to see if there was similar uplift there.



TrueNAS 25.10 Beta Brings Installation Improvements, NVIDIA Blackwell Support

([Operating Systems] 28 August 04:21 PM EDT TrueNAS 25.10 Beta)

The engineers over at iXsystems announced today the beta release of TrueNAS 25.10 "Goldeneye" as the latest iteration of this formerly BSD-based OS that has transitioned to making use of the Linux kernel while unifying both the TrueNAS CORE and SCALE offerings.



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