Open Source

The Linux Kernel Hit A Decade Low In 2024 For The Number Of New Commits Per Year
With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel ...
2024-12-31 16:07
Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 Brings RISC-V & Drops i386 Installer
In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...
2024-12-31 11:20
ZLUDA v4 Released For Initial CUDA Support On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-s...
2024-12-31 10:40
Samsung Galaxy S20 & S9 With Exynos 9810 Support Coming To Linux 6.14
The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January...
2024-12-31 10:23
Microsoft Continued With Many Linux & Open-Source Announcements In 2024
This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintena...
2024-12-31 09:50
The vital role of red teaming in safeguarding AI systems and data
Companies are feeling pressure to adopt generative AI to stay ahead in a competitive global market. To ensure they adopt responsibly, governing and regulatory bodies across the world are convening to debate and understand the best ways to address AI...
2024-12-31 09:00
Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops
It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its lates...
2024-12-31 07:20
AMD INVLPGB Linux Patches Updated For Broadcast TLB Invalidation
Right before Christmas Mesa engineer Rik van Riel posted Linux kernel patches to make use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction for broadcast TLB invalidation. INVLPGB is present in AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors since Zen 3 and early data showed by Rik indica...
2024-12-31 07:01
Mesa Saw Fewer Patches This Year But Valve's Contributions Took The Top Spot
While the Mesa 3D graphics drivers saw many new features and improvements land in 2024, on a Git commit basis it's actually at a several year low in terms of new commits. Here are the numbers as well as a look at the most active contributors to Mesa, i...
2024-12-31 06:48
Clang 20 Compiler Adds Support For Xtensa CPU Target
Back in early 2023 an Xtensa back-end was added to LLVM for the Cadence Tensilica Xtensa IP. Xtensa is used for DSPs, micro-controllers, and this 32-bit RISC architecture is also used for other hardware like data processing engines. Two years after the...
2024-12-31 06:33
FreeBSD Collaborating With AMD, NetBSD 10.0 Release & Other BSD Highlights Of 2024
While predominantly covering Linux-related news and Linux benchmarking at Phoronix, the BSDs hold a special spot. Here's a look back at some of the most exciting BSD milestones and FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD project news of 2024...
2024-12-31 06:15
Kdenlive is Adding One of Final Cut Pro’s Best Features
Removing backgrounds from video in Kdenlive, the free, open-source video editor for Linux, macOS and Windows, is about to get a whole lot easier. This “modern background removal tool” uses object masks to automatically cut out the subject of a vide...
2024-12-31 03:54
Meet Orbit, Mozilla’s AI Assistant Extension for Firefox
Orbit by Mozilla is a new AI-powered assistant for the Firefox web browser that makes summarising web content while you browse as easy as clicking a button. After all, why read an article to understand what it says when you can read an AI summary rephr...
2024-12-30 23:24
Chimera Linux enters beta
We’ve talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique Linux distribution that combines a BSD userland with the LLVM/Clang toolchain, and musl. Its init system is dinit, and it uses apk-tools from Alpine as its package manager. None of this has ...
2024-12-30 21:47
local_offer
Xfce 4.20, COSMIC Alpha & LXQt 2 Led Alternative Open-Source Desktops In 2024
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 L...
2024-12-30 20:25
Deadline Scheduling Policy Being Experimented With For Linux Graphics Drivers
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...
2024-12-30 15:04
Running NetBSD 10.1 on a 1998 Toshiba laptop
Here are my notes on running NetBSD 10.1 on my first personal laptop that I still keep, a 1998 i586 Toshiba Satellite Pro with 81Mb of RAM and a 1Gb IBM 2.5″ IDE HD. In summary, the latest NetBSD runs well on this old hardware using an IDE to CF adap...
2024-12-30 14:59
local_offer
Intel's Linux Performance Optimizations Continue Paying Off For AMD EPYC
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 ba...
2024-12-30 12:30
Cloudflare Makes Open-Source h3i For HTTP/3 Testing & Debugging
Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...
2024-12-30 11:27
9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: December 29th, 2024
The 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for December 29th, 2024, brings news about postmarketOS 24.12, Mixxx 2.5, siduction 2024.1.0, 4MLinux 47.0, Amarok 3.2, Serpent OS Alpha, as well as all the latest distro and software updates. The post 9to5Linux Weekly Roun...
2024-12-30 11:11