ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

GNOME Image Viewer Adds Image Editing Support

([GNOME] 27 December 03:54 PM EST GNOME Viewer Image Editing)

The GNOME Image Viewer has merged initial support for basic image editing capabilities into the application.



Bottles Software For Easily Running Windows Games/Apps On Linux To Leverage Rust

([WINE] 27 December 02:46 PM EST Rusty Bottles)

Bottles as the open-source manager for Wine to more easily run Windows games and applications on Linux has been pursuing the "Bottles Next" initiative as a rewrite to this software. The Bottles developers have decided they will be leveraging the Rust programming language as well as the libcosmic UI toolkit as part of this rewrite.



New Linux Drivers Improve Support For ARM-Powered HUAWEI MateBook E Go Laptops

([Arm] 27 December 01:11 PM EST HUAWEI MateBook E Go)

A new set of patches implement EC, UCSI, and PSY drivers for the ARM-based HUAWEI MateBook E Go laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. In turn these new Linux kernel patches get a lot more functionality working for these Huawei ARM64 laptops.



CentOS Stream 10 vs. AlmaLinux 10 Beta vs. RHEL 10 Beta Performance Benchmarks

([Operating Systems] 27 December 10:43 AM EST 6 Comments)

Following the benchmarks earlier this month looking at the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 beta performance as well as the AlmaLinux 10 beta, on the same AMD EPYC server here are benchmarks when adding in CentOS Stream 10 to the mix. CentOS Stream 10 as the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is largely similar to what's found in the RHEL 10.0 beta but one of the key differences is being powered by Linux 6.12 LTS rather than Linux 6.11 as currently used by the AlmaLinux/RHEL 10 beta. Here is how the performance of CentOS Stream 10 is looking in comparison on the same hardware.



Performance Improvements To Google's Binder Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.14

([Google] 27 December 10:09 AM EST Faster Page Installation)

A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14.



AMD Continued Ramping Up Their Linux & Open-Source Investments In 2024

([AMD] 27 December 10:35 AM EST AMD 2024 Highlights)

AMD's new products this year have not only been supported well on the server side with their new EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors but also on the consumer side with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop and Ryzen 9000 series desktop Zen 5 processors. AMD provided timely Zen 5 support across the stack as well as pursuing new AMD P-State driver optimizations, getting out the AMDXDNA Ryzen AI accelerator driver, and a lot of other new open-source Linux code for new hardware features, prepping for upcoming hardware like RDNA4 graphics, and pursuing optimizations for existing hardware.



OneXPlayer Linux Driver Being Brought To Parity With Windows Driver For These Handhelds

([Hardware] 27 December 06:48 AM EST OneXPlayer)

OneXPlayer maintains a line of handheld gaming consoles following in the success of the likes of Valve's Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and ASUS ROG Ally. These OneXPlayer devices ship with Microsoft Windows by default but the Linux support has been improving.



GNOME Added Many New Features This Year Amid Foundation Woes

([GNOME] 27 December 06:31 AM EST GNOME 2024)

The GNOME desktop environment had a vibrant 2024 with landing many new features, continuing to refine its (X)Wayland integration, apps like Ptyxis as a modern terminal taking off, and more. From the software side 2024 was great for GNOME while over on the GNOME Foundation side they had to deal with coping from running a recent deficit and also their executive director departing after less than one year.



Linux's Preempt Lazy Support Coming To POWER CPUs

([Linux Kernel] 27 December 06:13 AM EST Preempt Lazy For PowerPC)

Linux 6.13 is introducing a new Lazy Preemption mode with the "PREEMPT_LAZY" option. The lazy preemption mode is similar to full preemption but is less eager to preempt normal (SCHED_NORMAL) tasks. The goal is on reducing lock holder preemption and obtaining some of the performance gains found under the voluntary preemption mode. For Linux 6.13 the lazy preemption mode was exposed for x86/x86_64, RISC-V, and later added for LoongArch. Likely with the upcoming Linux 6.14, lazy preempt should work on POWER platforms.



GCC ASCII Art Visualizations, Timely Znver5 & Other Compiler Highlights Of 2024

([Programming] 26 December 05:26 PM EST Open-Source Compilers)

Both GCC and LLVM/Clang made great strides in 2024 in rounding up their latest C and C++ support, enabling new hardware targets, and a variety of other features. Plus other open-source compilers targeting different features / languages, device types, and more also advanced a lot this calendar year. For those excited about turning code into binaries, here's a look back at the most popular compiler articles on Phoronix.



KDE Enjoyed A Stellar 2024 With The Debut Of The Plasma 6 Desktop

([KDE] 26 December 12:30 PM EST KDE 2024 Highlights)

The KDE desktop progress made over the course of 2024 was particularly stand-out thanks to the Plasma 6.0 debut near the beginning of the year and then Plasma 6.1 and 6.2 further stabilizing and polishing this open-source desktop. It was a very fine year for the KDE desktop.



The Performance Benefits Of Linux 6.12 LTS Over Linux 6.6 LTS

([Software] 26 December 11:30 AM EST 31 Comments)

Linux 6.12 was recently promoted to being this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel with it being the last major kernel release of 2024. For those enterprise Linux users, hyperscalers, and others typically jumping from one annual LTS kernel to the next, in this holiday article are some benchmarks looking at the performance benefits of Linux 6.12 LTS compared to Linux 6.6 LTS while testing on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation.



Intel Linux Performance Optimizations & Intel's Other Open-Source Wins From 2024

([Intel] 26 December 08:55 AM EST Intel 2024 Highlights)

In addition to the exciting hardware launches this year particularly around Xeon 6 Granite Rapids, Lunar Lake processors, and the new low-cost Battlemage graphics cards, what remains particularly exciting and consistent are all of Intel's great investments around open-source and Linux. Over 2024 there were many exciting performance optimizations, new Linux kernel features, GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain improvements, and countless other enhancements made throughout the open-source ecosystem by Intel engineers.



Reiser5 Would Be Turning Five Years Old But Remains Dead

([Linux Storage] 26 December 06:47 AM EST Reiser5 Dead)

It was on New Year's Eve 2019 that Edward Shishkin announced the Reiser5 file-system as an evolution of the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code. While next week would mark five years of Reiser5, the Reiser4/Reiser5 file-system still appears effectively dead and hasn't been touched in quite a while.



AMD Ryzen PCs May See More Power Savings Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 6.14

([AMD] 26 December 06:55 AM EST AMD P-State Change)

AMD Ryzen systems with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel may see increased power savings out-of-the-box due to an AMD P-State driver change queued up as part of the new power management code for this next version of the Linux kernel.



Pre-Content fanotify / fanotify Hierarchical Storage Management Expected For Linux 6.14

([Linux Storage] 26 December 06:22 AM EST pre-content fanotify)

Queued up by way of linux-fs.git's "for_next" Git branch is the fanotify HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) implementation via the pre-content fanotify patch series.



Hash-Based Integrity Checking Proposed For Linux To Help With Reproducible Builds

([Linux Kernel] 26 December 06:00 AM EST Reproducible Kernel Builds)

An interesting request for comments (RFC) patch series was posted on Christmas for introducing hash-based integrity checking to help with the reproducible builds initiative around the Linux kernel.



Linux RNDIS Removal Branch Updated For Disabling Microsoft RNDIS Protocol Drivers

([Linux Networking] 25 December 12:33 PM EST RNDIS Removal For 2025?!)

There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic.



systemd Highlights For 2024 From Run0 To Varlink To Advancing systemd-homed

([systemd] 25 December 09:46 AM EST systemd 2024)

Systemd had another busy year working on many new features from run0 as a sudo alternative to making systemd-homed more robust, increasing Varlink use, systemd-boot continuing to gain more traction, and more.



Intel Mesa Code Lands Big Patch Series For Treating Convergent Values As SIMD8

([Intel] 25 December 06:46 AM EST Intel SIMD8 Compiler Bits)

A patch series six months in the making and consisting of 24 patches by longtime Intel Linux graphics engineer Ian Romanick was merged on Christmas Eve for Mesa 25.0.



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