Since last month's Steam Deck launch a few Phoronix readers have been asking about USB-C hubs for expanding connectivity with this handheld Linux-powered gaming console. Pretty much any reliable USB-C hub should do, while for my purposes the past month I've been using the Anker USB-C Hub...
FEX-Emu is the open-source project striving for speedy x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 with similar objectives to Box86/Box64. FEX-Emu is working toward allowing Steam and other x86_64 Linux games to work on 64-bit Arm hardware and achieving some early success. Out today is FEX-Emu 2203 as the latest step in that direction...
Back in 2017 the Mesa open-source OpenGL driver for Broadcom VC5 hardware most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 aimed to enable anisotropic filtering (AF). However, that patch wasn't fully hooked up correctly and now this past week should be in good shape...
Beyond all their timely Linux kernel contributions surrounding their processors and graphics hardware, Intel continues well with ensuring network adapters, Bluetooth, and other ASICs are generally well supported on Linux ahead of launch. With Linux 5.18 there is now support for "Madison peak" as another yet-to-be-announced Bluetooth chip...
Going back to the original Razer Copperhead mouse in 2005, I've tested many different Razer mice over the years and have exclusively used Razer mice on my main production system for basically as long. This week the scrollwheel physically broke on a Razer DeathAdder mouse I've used the past few years so quickly ordered a replacement, which sadly turned out to be the worst Razer mouse I've personally ever used, and replaced it a day later...
In development recently has been sdl12-compat as a compatibility layer that implements the SDL 1.2 interfaces atop SDL 2.0. This effort allows many older Linux games not seeing updates for SDL2 to in turn make use of the newer version by way of this compatibility layer...
Just under one month ago was the ROCm 5.0 release with formal RDNA2 support and on Friday night marked the latest point release for that open-source AMD Radeon Open eCosystem compute stack update...
Unfortunately this week the KDE project saw "overall activity was lower than usual" that in part at least seems to be fallout from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Sadly some Ukranian KDE contributors have been impacted by the ongoing situation and some KDE Russia contributors have also been impacted by their Internet restrictions...
Back in January I wrote about LatencyFlex as an open-source, vendor-agnostic alternative to NVIDIA Reflex. This drop-in replacement to NVIDIA's proprietary solution focused on reducing rendering latency is out with its very first release...
After many years of waiting and past faltered efforts, "Imagination Tech publishing a new open-source driver" probably wasn't on your bingo card for 2022... But they are doing such with a new open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa...
In addition to this morning's release of VKD3D-Proton 2.6, DXVK 1.10 has been released as the Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...
VKD3D-Proton 2.6 is out as the latest update to this project used by Steam Play / Proton for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan for accelerating Windows games on Linux...
Besides the dance of getting all of the various open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver components upstreamed (i.e. the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, LLVM back-end) and worked out to major Linux distributions in time for new graphics processor releases, another challenge has been on the firmware/microcode front with also needing those binary blobs made publicly available in time and also picked up by the Linux distributions. For some past Radeon graphics card launches AMD hasn't posted those necessary blobs until the day of or a few days past launch. Fortunately, ahead of their next launch, the initial firmware binaries were posted today...
Up to this point my Intel Alder Lake DDR5 memory testing on Linux has been limited to a set of DDR5-4400 modules given the very limited DDR5 availability. But with having recently received a DDR5-6000 kit, here is a look at how the Intel Core i9 12900K performs under Linux with memory speeds up to DDR5-6000 and running a memory scaling comparison from 3000 to 6000 MT/s.
Mesa's Venus driver providing VirtIO-GPU Vulkan support that was developed by Google as part of the Virgil effort for 3D acceleration within guest VMs can now run ANGLE. Google's ANGLE in turn is their OpenGL ES conformant implementation that can run atop Vulkan / Metal / OpenGL / Direct3D interfaces...
The Rust-based Cloud-Hypervisor that started out as an open-source VMM at Intel for cloud workloads and now developed under the Linux Foundation is out with a new feature release...
Added back in 2020 with the Linux 5.10 kernel was the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode for reducing commit latency in the ordered data mode. Now for the upcoming Linux 5.18 cycle, that fast commits mode should be even faster...
One year ago this week Qt 5.15.3 LTS was released with 200+ bug fixes for this toolkit but that long-term support release was made commercial-only. Today The Qt Company has made available an open-source release of the Qt 5.15.3 changes...
OpenBLAS recently added support for Russia's Elbrus E2000 processors, however, the OpenBLAS developers are now debating whether to drop support for these Russian domestically-produced CPUs given Russia's invasion into Ukraine...
Intel's big open-source Linux graphics driver engineering team has submitted their last feature pull of new material for inclusion into the upcoming Linux 5.18 kernel. Intel engineers remain very busy on the discrete GPU enablement both for the DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics cards as well as the forthcoming compute accelerators...
While much of Intel's Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" enablement has been squared away for a while now within the Linux kernel and related components, there are a few holdouts only now coming about in patch form and working their way to the mainline kernel with Sapphire Rapids production ramping up in the coming months...
The AMDGPU Linux kernel driver is preparing a new interface for allowing user-space to submit work to the GPU that will be executed across multiple engines simultaneously...
VMware engineers are in the process of enabling 3D acceleration within their VMWGFX driver on AArch64 so those making use of VMware virtualization software on 64-bit Arm will be able to enjoy accelerated 3D guest virtual machines...
AMD developers had a busy day with merging into mainline LLVM for the AMDGPU shader compiler is a new Vega/CDNA "GFX940" GPU target as well as a GFX1036 RDNA GPU target...
Last month I covered the issue of Lenovo's ACPI Platform Profile support for AMD-powered laptops was busted on Linux. The platform profile controls were exposed but in reality did not work. Fortunately, fixed up support for this feature is now on the way to the Linux kernel for letting users choose between better performance or extended battery life and cooler operating device...
KDE/Qt-focused consulting firm KDAB has been developing CXX-Qt as a new project to improve integration of the Rust programming language with the Qt toolkit...
While the VKD3D-Proton downstream gets much of the spotlight these days for the Direct3D 12 API implemented atop Vulkan for use by Valve's Steam Play (Proton), Wine's VKD3D continues to be developed and is closing in on its v1.3 release...
Intel In-Field Scan is a hardware feature we have not heard the company talk about publicly until yesterday when they posted a new open-source Linux driver for this hardware failure testing feature being introduced with Sapphire Rapids processors...
The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium was announced today for fostering an open chiplet ecosystem for future generations of hardware...
Microsoft on Tuesday posted a third iteration of their "DXGKRNL" Linux kernel driver for DirectX / Hyper-V compute support for use within Windows Subsystem for Linux / Windows Subsystem for Android...
Last month there were discussions around potentially working to upstream the Linux support for Nintendo's Wii U game console. While there are serious limitations to the support, posted today were the patch series for review providing basic Wii U enablement...
The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Java, Flutter, Firefox, LibreOffice, and numerous other applications and toolkits is out with HarfBuzz 4.0...
As part of AMD's new approach for quietly bringing up new graphics hardware support within their open-source Linux graphics driver, today AMD landed new graphics chip support within their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...
Valve's newest game is... Aperture Desk Job. This is a mini game set within the Portal universe and used for showing off the Steam Deck controls while also working with other game controllers too...
After announcing Amazon Luna back in 2020 as their cloud gaming service, today Amazon officially rolled it out to all US users. With this launch also comes a limited, rotating selection of games free to Amazon Prime members...
The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has been an invaluable resource over the years for web developers with a plethora of open, detailed documentation on a wide variety of HTMl, CSS, and JavaScript features along with extensive Web API references. While MDN has suffered setbacks from recent Mozilla layoffs, today the organization is launching their new MDN and reaffirming that MDN Plus will be announced soon...
Genode OS continues to be developed as an innovative open-source operating system framework. Genode developers closed out February by issuing the Genode OS Framework 22.02 release with many new features and improvements...
While Intel's DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics card support with the open-source Linux driver stack appears to be getting into shape with the latest upstream code ahead of the graphics cards expected to ship next quarter, the Xe HP compute accelerator support remains very much a work-in-progress for the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver...
During the course of February on Phoronix were 236 original news articles covering the state of open-source affairs and Linux performance. While the pandemic seems to be lightening up, sadly the ad industry is still in a downward state, but in any event here is a look at the most popular Phoronix content for the past month...
Smartmontools 7.3 was released as the first update to this open-source package in more than one year for providing a utility (smartctl) and daemon (smartd) for monitoring the SMART capabilities built into modern (S)ATA / NVMe / SCSI / SAS disk drives...
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