Page 137 - Esktop Linux News Today

With my Raspberry Pi 5 review and benchmarks I focused on the CPU performance of the quad-core Cortex-A76 2.4GHz Broadcom SoC powering this new single board computer, but the graphics upgrade are just as equally impressive.

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

Sound Open Firmware 2.7 released overnight and adds AMD Van Gogh platform support, presumably to be used by the Valve Steam Deck or some future refresh of the device or related platform like for VR hardware.

For those using the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed Linux distribution, there is now experimental support for booting it using systemd-boot.

With the Intel Arrow Lake NPU being very similar to Meteor Lake for this neural processing unit, the patches enabling that NPU for next-gen Intel Core CPUs was submitted as a 'fix' for the ongoing Linux 6.6 cycle.

With today's release of kmod 31, Linux's modprobe utility for loading kernel modules can finally allow arbitrary paths to allow loading new kernel modules from anywhere on the file-system.

Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers have begun submitting their feature changes to DRM-Next of new i915 kernel driver feature material they are preparing for the Linux 6.7 cycle this winter.

Intel engineers have merged to Mesa 23.3 the initial open-source 'ANV' Vulkan driver support for sparse resources! This is the important feature needed for running a number of newer Direct3D 12 games with Steam Play (Proton) via VKD3D-Proton with Intel graphics hardware.

After a difficult few years of global supply chain woes leading to limited available and heightened retail pricing on the Raspberry Pi single board computers, today there is finally an update to the family.

In addition to KDE Plasma 6.0, another exciting desktop milestone we can look forward to in 2024 is the COSMIC desktop from System76 when they end up releasing the next Pop!_OS based upon Ubuntu 24.04 LTS