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)

Intel ANV Driver Improves Vulkan Image Compression Going Back To Tigerlake

([Intel] 4 December 05:37 AM EST Vulkan Image Compression)

Merged for Mesa 25.0 yesterday to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is enabling more storage compression on Tigerlake graphics hardware and newer.



VTE-Based Linux Terminals Now Support A Nice Feature Led By Windows Terminal

([Desktop] 4 December 06:03 AM EST Better Progress Indicators)

VTE-based terminals on Linux like Ptyxis are now seeing support introduced to better display progress state for long-running processes with a more visually pleasing progress bar. Microsoft's Windows Terminal has already supported this feature while now with systemd beginning to support using these Operating System Command escape sequences, Linux terminal support is on the rise.



SDL Introducing Async I/O APIs - Backed By IO_uring On Linux

([Linux Gaming] 4 December 05:45 AM EST SDL3 Async I/O)

Longtime Linux game porter Ryan Gordon has introduced initial asynchronous I/O APIs for the in-development SDL3 library. On Linux these async I/O APIs allow making use of the modern kernel IO_uring functionality.



AMD ROCm 6.3 Tags Begin Appearing On GitHub

([Radeon] 3 December 08:50 PM EST ROCm 6.3)

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.



Fedora 42 Aims To Enhance The Windows Subsystem For Linux Experience

([Fedora] 3 December 02:37 PM EST Fedora 42 WSL Images)

A new feature proposal seeks to improve the Fedora Linux experience when running under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 11.



Intel Announces Arc B-Series "Battlemage" Discrete Graphics With Linux Support

([Graphics Cards] 3 December 09:00 AM EST 66 Comments)

Succeeding the Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards that launched two years ago as the DG2/Alchemist series, the next-gen Battlemage graphics cards are being announced today. The embargo lifts today on the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards with initial availability next week. Like the prior generation Intel graphics and as discussed already in many Phoronix articles, Battlemage is still treated to fully open-source graphics driver support on Linux.



AMD User Queue Mesa Support Merged For Linux - Submitting Work Directly To The GPU

([Radeon] 3 December 08:24 AM EST AMDGPU User Queue)

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.



AMD NPU Firmware Upstreamed For The Ryzen AI AMDXDNA Driver Coming In Linux 6.14

([AMD] 3 December 06:33 AM EST AMD NPU Firmware)

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.



Rustls Multi-Threaded Performance Is Battering OpenSSL

([Programming] 3 December 06:14 AM EST Rustls Benchmarks)

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.



PostgreSQL Finally Deprecates MD5 Passwords

([Programming] 3 December 05:20 AM EST PostgreSQL)

While long overdue, the PostgreSQL database server has finally deprecated MD5 password support with its latest code.



NVIDIA RTX Remix 0.6 Brings CPU/GPU Performance Improvements

([NVIDIA] 3 December 05:34 AM EST NVIDIA RTX Remix 0.6)

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 era games is out with the newest version of the RTX-Remix runtime that is powered in part by DXVK for Direct3D to Vulkan mapping.



Last Call For This Year's Phoronix Premium Cyber Week Sale

([Premium] 3 December 05:07 AM EST Ends Today)

If you would like to show your support this holiday season and enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits, today is the last day of the discounted rate on joining Phoronix Premium.



FreeBSD 14.2 Released With OpenZFS Upgrade, Installer Improvements

([BSD] 2 December 08:20 PM EST FreeBSD 14.2)

FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE is out today as a strong, incremental update to the FreeBSD 14 series.



NVK, RADV, & Other Mesa Drivers Ready With Launch Day Vulkan 1.4 Support

([Mesa] 2 December 02:09 PM EST Vulkan 1.4)

Years ago when new OpenGL spec releases would occur, it could take months or years for the open-source Mesa drivers to catch-up in supporting the latest versions... Thankfully in the Vulkan space it continues to prove to be a very different story. As we've seen with prior Vulkan specs, today's Vulkan 1.4 spec release is greeted by same-day Mesa patches.



Mir 2.19 Released With Atomic KMS Platform Support, New Wayland Protocols

([Ubuntu] 2 December 01:51 PM EST Mir 2.19)

Mir 2.19 is out today as the newest version of this Ubuntu/Canonical project making it easier for other desktops/environments to embrace Wayland support. This set of libraries for building Wayland-based shells has added a few new features with today's update.



Vulkan 1.4 Released With More Extensions Mandated, Better 8K Rendering

([Vulkan] 2 December 12:00 PM EST Vulkan 1.4)

As a lovely early Christmas present, The Khronos Group used SIGGRAPH Asia today for announcing the Vulkan 1.4 specification release.



AMD Per-Core Energy Counter Support Slated For Linux 6.14

([AMD] 2 December 10:00 AM EST Per-Core Energy Monitoring)

While the Linux 6.13 merge window just closed yesterday in landing all of the new features and functionality for that first kernel version of 2025, already for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle to follow a feature was queued up early this morning in a TIP branch: AMD per-core energy counter support.



Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Retires

([Intel] 2 December 08:47 AM EST Pat Gelsinger Retires)

While Intel has been under much financial difficulties and as they pursue their build out of new fabs to better compete with TSMC, to much surprise Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired effective today.



Qt 6.8.1 Toolkit Released With 550+ Bug Fixes

([Qt] 2 December 08:27 AM EST Qt 6.8.1)

Building off the early October release of Qt 6.8 LTS, Qt 6.8.1 is out today with more than 550 fixes collected over the past two months.



Vulkan Video Now Enabled By Default For Radeon VCN2/VCN3 Hardware On Linux

([Mesa] 2 December 07:00 AM EST Vulkan Video default)

An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.



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This was the ultimate form of ostentation among technology freaks -- to have
a system so complete and sophisticated that nothing showed; no machines,
no wires, no controls.
-- Michael Swanwick, "Vacuum Flowers"