Valve's Linux Contributions, Wayland & Open-Source NVIDIA Milestones Topped 2023
For reliving some of the best open-source/Linux moments of 2023, below is a look at the 30 most popular news articles on Phoronix of the year. There's been many exciting software and hardware milestones of the year. What did you like the best of 2023? What do you hope to see of Linux in 2024? Share with us your end-of-year thoughts by commenting on this article in the forums.
Vulkan 1.3.250 Released With Another New Extension From Valve
Vulkan 1.3.250 is out today as the latest routine spec update and brings a handful of spec fixes plus one new extension.
Valve Is A Wonderful Upstream Contributor To Linux & The Open-Source Community
This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.
Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider
Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark.
Roundcube Open-Source Webmail Software Merges With Nextcloud
The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.
Intel Publishes Blazing Fast AVX-512 Sorting Library, Numpy Switching To It For 10~17x Faster Sorts
Intel recently published an open-source C++ header file library for high performance SIMD-based sorting, which initially is focused on providing a lightning fast AVX-512 quicksort implementation. As of today that code has been merged to Numpy and is providing some 10~17x speed-ups.
FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading As Its "Most Complex Refactoring" In Decades
The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.
ipmitool Repository Archived, Developer Suspended By GitHub
The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.
The Rust Implementation Of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust
Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.
Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.
Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org
Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Six Great Features With The Upcoming Linux 6.6 Kernel
Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features.
Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 ISOs Recalled Due To Malicious User Translations
Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech.
Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code
Following Red Hat's decision earlier this month to limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code and that leading to downstreams scrambling to figure out their paths forward to avoid tracking CentOS Stream instead and still aiming to offer 1:1 RHEL compatibility without being restricted by the Red Hat Customer Portal, the Rocky Linux distribution today expressed a few of the ideas they are considering.
Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code To Be Removed
I hadn't heard any mentions of Intel's Thunder Bay in quite a while besides the occasional Linux kernel patch while now it has been officially confirmed as a cancelled Intel product and the Linux driver code being worked on the past 2+ years is on the chopping block.
Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support
With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel.
Linux 6.3 Introducing Hardware Noise "hwnoise" Tool
As part of the tracing updates sent in for Linux 6.3 is the introduction of the new "hwnoise" tool within the kernel source tree for monitoring and quantifying hardware noise.
sudo & su Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety
With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software.
Firefox Is Going To Try And Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default
Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default!
The Current Challenges With Using Linux On Airplanes
Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons. Using Linux though and other open-source software would ease development, open more developers to being able to work on said avionics platforms, have much better documentation, and lower other barriers, but there are challenges currently involved.
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