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Phoronix

Qualcomm Upstreaming Initial GPU Support For Snapdragon X2 Elite In Linux 6.19

Back in September the Qualcomm X2 Elite SoCs were announced for next-gen Windows 11 on Arm laptops. Since then some initial X2 Elite enablement patches for the Linux kernel have arrived and for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel more of that work will reach mainline. Excitingly, Linux 6.19 is now bringing GPU and display support for the Adreno X2-85 found within the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC...

Phoronix

AMD Continues Working On Xen GPU Virtualization Features - "The Best Is Yet To Come"

When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn't seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say "the best is yet to come" in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts...

Phoronix

More NVIDIA Nova Enablement For Linux 6.19 With Other Rust Graphics Driver Code

Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver continues taking shape albeit isn't yet ready for end-user usage...

Phoronix

GCC 16 Compiler Now Ready For AVX10.2 & APX With Intel Nova Lake

Intel's ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilities and now the GCC compiler has received similar treatment...

Linux.org

Terminal Prompt Customization

In two previous articles, Gentoo OpenRC Installation and Bash 02 โ€“ Variables and Such, I mentioned the use of the Prompt String 1, 'PS1', to change the prompt for the Command-Line Interface (CLI). Let's look at this in more detail to get your prompt to be more specific to what you want it to be in the terminal. Configuration... https://www.linux.org/threads/terminal-prompt-customization.57149/

OMG! Ubuntu

Xubuntu Reveals How Its Website Was Hijacked in October

The Xubuntu team has shared details on last monthโ€™s worrying website hijack, pinpointing how the attack happened and the steps its taking to prevent a repeat in the future. As detailed in our coverage back in October, the official Xubuntu download page began serving a malicious .zip file to users attempting to download the official torrent on October 15. Though the incident was resolved quickly once detected, questions were raised about how it couldโ€™ve happened in the first place, and whether any one had been affected. Today, the Xubuntu team, based on information Canonical has shared with it, has answers. [โ€ฆ]

Phoronix

Vulkan SER Showing Up To ~47% Performance Improvement For Ray-Tracing

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance...

Phoronix

Uniwill Laptop Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.19 Kernel

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer...

LWN.net

Blender 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of the Blender animation system has been released. Notable improvements include improved color management, HDR capabilities, and a new storyboarding template. See the release notes for a lengthy list of new features and changes, and the bugfixes page for the 588 commits that fixed bugs in Blender 4.5 or older.