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 Linux distribution reached alpha form, Xfce 4.20 released earlier this month, LXQt 2.0 and 2.1 debuted, and other improvements too.

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.

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 back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.

Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging.

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 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!

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.

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 resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL.

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.

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 more enhancements.

The holiday between Christmas and New Year's is... Linus Torvalds' birthday on 28 December. Capping off the Linux creator's 55th birthday week is the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel release.

Back in April was the release of the Amarok 3.0 music player for KDE after a six year hiatus and their first version ported to using the Qt5 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 5. Now in ending out 2024, the Amarok team has released an updated version of this open-source music player that provides initial support for the Qt6 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 6.

Last weekend a Meta engineer posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. The Linux kernel can in turn invalidate TLB entries on remote CPUs without needing to send IPIs and without having to wait for remote CPUs to handle those interrupts. Synthetic benchmarks shown in that patch series were very promising and thus I carried out some benchmarking over the holidays of this AMD INVLPGB support for the Linux kernel.

The KDE app Kdenlive that is a very popular and featureful open-source video editor is preparing for an exciting 2025.

Thanks to work from Intel engineers, the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle will feature faster USB xHCI DbC performance for debug performance and a few other missing xHCI bits being addressed. Plus there is a fix for a rare 10 year old USB bug report.

From my independent monitoring, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty great year. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS shipped and has been well received across enterprises, Canonical engineers have been focusing more on performance optimizations for Ubuntu, and there has been other interesting changes like their new commitment to always ship the latest upstream Linux kernel version as of Ubuntu release time. Plus they have continued with various GNOME desktop improvements, Ubuntu on servers continues with steady traction, and all-around was a pretty exciting year for the Ubuntu camp.

While Linux 6.13 is introducing basic support for various Apple iPads and iPhones using A-series SoCs, the support is just that: basic. Various feature limitations remain for those dreaming over the prospects of running Linux on older Apple mobile devices. One of various feature limitations remaining are around backlight control for different models and for that there is the Apple DWI backlight driver for Linux that continues to be hacked on.

Earlier this month the Fish Shell 4.0 went into beta with the C++ code ported to Rust. Now with most of the Fish Shell code transitioned to Rust, the project put out a blog post this weekend outlining the successes and challenges they have encountered in porting their large C++ codebase to Rust.

The x86 fixes pull request was sent out this morning ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel being released later today. Both x86 fixes this week pertain to Intel bits: a self-test issue on upcoming Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) systems and also an issue of Intel TDX confidential computing VM guests potentially leaking decrypted memory within the unrecoverable error handling.

This year NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver enjoyed much more robust Wayland support, their open-source kernel modules have matured greatly and are now being used by default, and their proprietary Vulkan and OpenGL drivers remain in good standing for performant Linux gaming and workstation graphics. NVIDIA's Linux driver stack had a rather great year.

An interesting "request for comments" proposal I have been meaning to write about since last month is in-development work developing "Safe C++" as an extension to the LLVM Clang compiler and making use of the new, in-development ClangIR.