Driven by the XZ security fiasco with malicious code aimed at remote code execution, more open-source projects are re-evaluating their dependence on XZ out of an abundance of caution. The latest to take action is the Fwupd Linux firmware updating utility with LVFS that will now prefer Zstd compression instead of XZ...

Sound Open Firmware 2.9 has been released for this open-source project providing audio DSP firmware infrastructure and an adjoining SDK. This effort that started out by Intel for opening up more of their audio hardware firmware has expanded into a multi-vendor project with the likes of AMD and Mediatek also participating around this sound firmware infrastructure, audio driuvers, etc...

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation...

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired...

The PCI-SIG announced today that they have published their newest revision "version 0.5" of the forthcoming PCI Express 7.0 specification...

Mesa 24.1's Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for the Wayland linux-drm-syncobj-v1 protocol for explicit synchronization support...

The past two months I've been testing out the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 laptop as a new AMD Ryzen laptop from this Bavarian Linux PC retailer. It's been working out very well under Linux (as would be expected of TUXEDO Computers) and quite adaptable for power and performance. For those needing a capable Linux laptop the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 has proven quite stable and reliable under both their in-house TUXEDO OS distribution as well as Ubuntu Linux.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 8000 series processors -- their first AMD embedded chips to offer Ryzen AI with the onboard Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This AMD XDNA NPU support is similar to the existing Ryzen AI on the Ryzen 8000 series...

Following the recent upgrade to Rust 1.77, the Linux kernel Rust code is preparing to move to Rust 1.78 that will be released as stable in about one month...

Open-source developer Luke Junes continues doing a great job near single-handedly improving ASUS laptop support for Linux users. His many improvements over time to the ASUS-WMI kernel driver has enabled new features and functionality for ASUS laptops on Linux. Sent out on Monday was the newest patch series with additional feature work to this driver...

Qt 6.7 is out as the newest feature update to this cross-platform, commercial-focused toolkit...

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term...

The Simple DirectMedia Layer software/hardware abstraction layer commonly used by games and other cross-platform software is out with a new SDL 2.30.2 stable release as well as a new SDL3 preview release...

No, nothing to do with April Fools' Day, but the Steam Survey results are out for March 2024 and they put the Steam on Linux use inching up -- back closer to the Linux gaming highs of around 2%...

A new round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for the Linux 6.9 kernel. This round consists of lots of fixes for dealing with "extreme file-system damage" on this experimental open-source file-system...

Intel's Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) driver will act more efficiently come the Linux 6.10 kernel this summer...

In addition to looking at the open-source/Linux highlights for Q1, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix during the month of March. During the past month were 262 original news articles on Phoronix and another 13 featured benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There's always a lot happening from new kernel developments to exciting open-source GPU driver developments, new compiler initiatives, and a bit of a mailing list drama...

CachyOS as a reminder is the Arch Linux based distribution focused on providing a very performant out-of-the-box experience and supports x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4 packages along with other default changes compared to upstream Arch Linux. The April 2024 ISO release of CachyOS is now available for those wanting to enjoy a fresh spin of this rolling-release, performance-tuned platform...

In their March status update, the Linux Mint team shares more details on their forthcoming Linux Mint 22 release that will be based off Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

A patch queued in TIP.git's "x86/cpu" branch for collecting ahead of the Linux 6.10 kernel cycle adds support for handling the AMD 0x80000026 leaf to correct CPU topology information reporting for some newer AMD processors...