The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded 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 hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...

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...

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-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...

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...

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 maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises...

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 latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...

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 indicated nice improvement. A third iteration of those patches have already been posted as this AMD INLVPGB usage works its way to the mainline kernel...

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, including a Valve open-source graphics driver developer now taking the top spot...

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 LLVM back-end was introduced, the Clang C/C++ compiler has added Xtensa target support...

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...

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 Linux distribution reached alpha form, Xfce 4.20 released earlier this month, LXQt 2.0 and 2.1 debuted, and other improvements too...

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...

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 back at the end of 2022 on the same AMD Titanite EPYC reference server platform for two EPYC 9654 Genoa processors, I repeated the same tests using the newest releases of Intel Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for seeing how the performance has evolved.

Cloudflare is ending 2024 by announcing a new open-source project: h3i for low-level HTTP/3 testing and debugging...

The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!..

As a very interesting end-of-year change for Mesa 25.0, AMD is now using the ACO compiler by default for pre-GFX10 (before RDNA / Navi) GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

Last week Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution debuted in alpha form while kicking off the new week is updated install media to provide a few fixes for this original from-scratch Linux distribution...

AMD's GPUOpen team managed to squeeze in a new Vulkan Memory Allocator release into 2024. As a reminder this is a easy to use/integrate Vulkan memory allocation library for both Windows and Linux systems with hopes of making memory allocation and resource creation more easier like with Direct3D 11 and OpenGL...

Meta's Yann Collet of Zstd fame is rounding out 2024 by releasing xxHash 0.8.3 as the newest update to this extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm. The xxHash fast hash algorithm pushes for RAM speed limits and with the v0.8.3 update brings more enhancements...

The holiday between Christmas and New Year's is... Linus Torvalds' birthday on 28 December. Capping off the Linux creator's 55th birthday week is the Linux 6.13-rc5 kernel release...

Back in April was the release of the Amarok 3.0 music player for KDE after a six year hiatus and their first version ported to using the Qt5 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 5. Now in ending out 2024, the Amarok team has released an updated version of this open-source music player that provides initial support for the Qt6 toolkit and KDE Frameworks 6...