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Updated 2026-02-08 00:30
Valve's Gamescope Compositor Adds AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Support
Valve's Gamescope as a Wayland compositor for running games on Linux now has integrated support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)...
Intel Alder Lake & Linux Kernel Advancements Made For An Exciting January
Even with the pandemic still ongoing, there were plenty of exciting Linux software advancements and new hardware that made for an exciting January. Here is a look at the past from our Linux / open-source perspective...
x86 Straight Line Speculation Mitigation Being Back-Ported To GCC 11
There sure has been a lot of x86 straight-line speculation happenings in recent months with the compiler-based mitigation being merged for GCC 12 and then beginning with Linux 5.17 the kernel can make use of that new knob for fending off this potential vulnerability. Now the compiler support is even being back-ported to GCC 11...
Redis 7.0 Is Near With "Significant Performance Optimizations"
The first release candidate of Redis 7.0 was made available today. Getting us excited about this updated in-memory key-value database are "significant performance optimizations" among other improvements...
NVIDIA 470.103.01 Linux Driver Brings RTX 2050 / MX 570 / MX 550 Support
While we are awaiting the stable debut of the new NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series, NVIDIA's long-lived 470 series driver production branch has been updated...
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Linux Performance
AMD recently launched the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card for the $199 USD price point. While built on the current-generation RDNA2 architecture, this graphics card was widely panned for its price while only offering 4GB of video memory, limited to PCIe x4 bandwidth, and performance similar to the years-old Polaris GPUs. While all the major benchmarks online to this point have been under Windows, here is a look at how the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT is performing under Linux.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Integrating systemd-oomd For Improving Low Memory Handling
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is going to be making use of systemd-oomd for aiming to improve the experience when out of memory or under heavy memory pressure on the Linux distribution...
KDE's Falkon Browser Sees First Major Update In Nearly Three Years
Falkon as the KDE/Qt-focused open-source web browser is out with Falkon 3.2 as its first major update in nearly three years...
Intel Revs New Linux Patches Providing For Shadow Stacks For User-Space
For years Intel has been working on Linux patches for supporting their Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) with Indirect Branch Tracking and Shadow Stack support. It's been in the works for years and through many revisions while now they are pursuing a new route and focusing just on the Shadow Stack user-space functionality...
Btrfs Extent Tree v2 Work Progressing For Improving The File-System's On-Disk Format
You may recall the news from a few months ago about the work to improve Btrfs' on-disk format in addressing "painful parts" of its design. That "extrent-tree-v2" work has been progressing and recently was queued up into the Btrfs for-next code albeit hidden behind a debug flag...
Intel's ConnMan 1.41 Released With WPA3-SAE WPA_Supplicant Support, New IWD Too
Intel open-source engineer Marcel Holtmann is marking the end of January with new releases to their ConnMan Linux network connection manager software along with a new IWD as their iNet Wireless Daemon as an alternative to WPA_Supplicant on Linux systems...
Intel's Many Improvements In Linux 5.17 From Starting Raptor Lake Enablement To PFRUT
While it shouldn't be too surprising given Intel's open-source track record, but with the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel are once again many prominent additions from new/future hardware support to enabling exciting features...
Linux 5.17-rc2 Released - "A Bit On The Bigger Side"
Linus Torvalds' schedule due to travels remains a bit off and as such Linux 5.17-rc2 is already available this morning...
AMD Cooking Up A "PAN" Feature That Can Help Boost Linux Performance
AMD open-source engineers sent out a request for comments on a new kernel feature called "PAN", or Process Adaptive autoNUMA. Early numbers shown by AMD indicate that PAN can help with performance in some workloads on their latest server hardware by a measurable amount...
GNOME 42 Improves XWayland Auto Termination Handling
The latest GNOME 42 feature work to mention is a ten month old merge request landing that cleans up and improves the XWayland termination for when there are no more X11 clients running within the GNOME Wayland session...
AMD Publishes Latest Linux Patches For Enabling SEV-SNP Guest Support
One of the additions with EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors introduced last year was SEV-SNP as the "Secure Nested Paging" addition to AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization found with EPYC processors. While they have maintained an out-of-tree Linux source repository with the SEV-SNP patches, the mainline kernel is still lacking support for these latest security features but the code continues to undergo revisions and review for its eventual upstreaming...
Clear Linux Container Performance Continues Showing Sizable Gains
For those interested in using Distrobox to augment your operating system's package selection, not all containers are created equally. Distrobox developer Luca Di Maio recently did some tests for looking at the Linux container performance...
GNOME 42 Lands New Screenshot/Screencast UI
Developed during Google Summer of Code last year was an updated screenshot and screen recorder user interface. That improved screenshot/screencasting UI was merged this week for GNOME 42...
NIR Continues Successfully Serving The Needs Of Mesa, Better Suited Than LLVM
Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn't use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers...
Zstd-Compressed Linux Firmware Back To Being Eyed
Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options...
Wine-Staging 7.1 Adds Bindless Textures Patch To Fix Some Game Rendering Issues
Along with Wine 7.1 releasing on Friday, Wine-Staging 7.1 is also available as the more bleeding-edge version of Wine that carries more than five huundred extra patches atop the code-base...
KDE Plasma 5.24 Getting Ready For Release, More Wayland Fixes Merged
KDE developers have been very busy this month working up to the Plasma 5.24 LTS release in February. Plus with the 15 minute bug initiative underway and working to address remaining issues with the Plasma Wayland session, it's been a busy start of 2022...
Eclipse OpenJ9 0.30 Released For Latest JVM Alternative
In addition to this week bringing Oracle's GraalVM 22.0 release, Eclipse has released OpenJ9 0.30 as the latest version of their open-source Java Virtual Machine (JVM)...
Basis Universal 1.16 Released With OpenCL Support, Other Improvements
Version 1.16 of the Basis universal GPU texture codec developed by well known developer Rich Geldreich's Binomial LLC...
Wine 7.1 Released With Vulkan 1.3 Support, Theming Fixes
With Wine 7.0 having been released, the code freeze is over and we are now onto the Wine 7.x bi-weekly development releases that will then culminate with the Wine 8.0 stable release one year from now. In kicking off the new development series, Wine 7.1 is out today...
DXVK-NVAPI 0.5.2 Released With Entry Points For NVIDIA PhysX
DXVK-NVAPI as the open-source project implementing support for NVIDIA's NVAPI within the realm of DXVK is out with a new release, which is exciting for NVIDIA Linux gamers...
Wayland Testing New Protocol Extension To Handle Session Locking
Wayland Protocols 1.25 was released today as the collection of testing and stable Wayland protocols. New to Wayland Protocols 1.25 is the session-lock-v1 protocol being experimental and responsible to handle session locking...
GStreamer 1.20 RC1 Released With Many Exciting Improvements
The first release candidate of GStreamer 1.20 is now available for testing of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...
Intel Preparing Resizable BAR Support For Their Arc Graphics On Linux
Ahead of the Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards shipping this year, Intel's open-source developers have continued ironing out the Linux driver support. The most recent kernel patches are for getting their Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support in order...
Wasmer 2.2 Bringing Its WebAssembly "Singlepass" Compiler To AArch64
Wasmer 2.2-rc1 is out today as the WebAssembly run-tme to "run any code on any client" with its broad platform coverage and allowing numerous programming languages from Rust to PHP to C# being able to be compiled into WebAssembly and then running on any OS or embedded into other languages for execution...
JEDEC Publishes HBM3 Standard (JESD238)
JEDEC has published the JESD238 HBM3 standard as the next version for High Bandwidth Memory...
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Looks To Drop Its Partner Archive In Favor Of The Snap Store
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will likely do away with the Ubuntu/Canonical Partner Archive where their software partners could upload select proprietary/binary-only software for easy access by Ubuntu users...
Reverse Engineering & Open-Source Driver Work Advancing For Arm's Valhall GPU
The Arm Mali Valhall architecture reverse-engineering started last summer and while limited in the reverse engineering capabilities for several months, it looks like by this summer we'll hopefully see a working driver for Arm's newer graphics IP...
OPNsense 22.1 Released With This Open-Source Firewall Now Powered By FreeBSD 13
OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router software stack forked from pfSense, is out with its first major release of 2022...
Graphics Driver Changes Begin Lining Up For Linux 5.18
The first set of feature updates have been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle begins around the end of March...
Open 3D Game Engine 2111.2 Released
In addition to closing in on the Godot 4.0 release, another equally exciting effort in the open-source game engine space is the Open 3D Engine originally from the Amazon Lumberyard code and backed by the Linux Foundation and other organizations. Open 3D Engine 2111.2 is out today as the newest stable point release for this less than one year old open-source game engine effort...
Intel's Vulkan 1.3 Support All Ready For Mesa 22.0
As expected, Intel's open-source "ANV" driver is ready to go with Vulkan 1.3 for Mesa 22.0...
Intel Core i9 12900K P-State Governor Performance On Linux
Since Intel's Alder Lake launch one of the test requests to come in a few times has been about the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver and how its performance differs with the various governor choices available for altering the CPU frequency scaling behavior. Now that Linux 5.16 stable is out and running in good shape on Alder Lake, here are some Core i9 12900K benchmarks looking at various CPU frequency scaling choices and their impact on raw performance as well as CPU thermals and power consumption.
PipeWire 0.3.44 Released With Latency Improvements, Minimal PW Server Support
This will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on the Linux desktop across all major distributions for audio/video stream management. But for as good as PipeWire is already, frequent point releases continue evolving the functionality and ironing out compatibility improvements for existing JACK and PulseAudio integration. PipeWire 0.3.44 is out today as another step in the right direction...
Coreboot Merges Support For Intel's Arm-Based PSE Offload Engine
As of yesterday Intel's contributed Programmable Services Engine "PSE" support has been merged into mainline Coreboot for supporting this Arm-based dedicated offload engine found within select Intel processors...
Microsoft's CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Adds Intel SGX Support, Updated Packages
One of Microsoft's Linux/open-source surprises for 2021 was publishing of CBL-Mariner as their internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company. Microsoft has kept to updating CBL-Mariner publicly on a monthly basis and continuing to make it easier to test out and enhance its usefulness. Last night they published their January 2022 build of Microsoft's Linux operating system...
DirectFB2 Aims To Resurrect DirectFB For Embedded Systems
The DirectFB library had been a popular option for embedded systems in running off the Linux frame-buffer to avoid the full overhead of an X11 server. But a number of years ago DirectFB disappeared and ultimately stopped being maintained. Meanwhile Wayland has been making lots of inroads into mobile/embedded and areas once popular for DirectFB use. But now it turns out DirectFB2 is in development as a fork of the original DirectFB...
Intel Alder Lake N Support Introduced For Mesa 22.0
In addition to this week seeing Raptor Lake S support added for Mesa 22.0, the Alder Lake N additions have also been merged for this quarter's Mesa update...
Archinstall 2.3.1 Released With PipeWire App Profile Added, Btrfs Install Improvements
Archinstall as the quick and easy-to-use installer for the Arch Linux distribution is out with a new point release delivering a few worthwhile enhancements to the text-based OS installer...
Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Patched For New Security Issue But Can Impact Performance
Intel's "i915" kernel graphics driver has been patched for a software issue that could lead to malicious user-space trigger DMAR read/write faults or worse is the possibility of user-space gaining access to random memory pages. Unfortunately, the security fix comes with performance implications...
Valve To Formally Launch Steam Deck On 25 February, Shipping Begins 28 February
After slipping from the original shipping target of Q4 due to component shortages, Valve is making good on their Q1'2022 shipping plans for the Steam Deck...
SDL2 On Linux Now Prefers Wayland Over X11
With today's SDL2 Git, Wayland is now preferred over X.Org/X11 by default without having to set the SDL video driver environment variable...
Valve Working On Radeon Dynamic VRS For The Steam Deck To Increase Power Savings
Yet another open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement being worked on by Valve's engineers is around better controlling variable rate shading "VRS" behavior with a focus on improving power savings for the Steam Deck...
Intel Celeron G6900 Benchmarks - Performance Of Intel's $40~60 Alder Lake Processor
At the top-end of Intel's current Alder Lake line-up is the Core i9 12900K while at the opposite end is the Celeron G6900... The Celeron G6900 is a dual-core Alder Lake processor with a suggested customer price of $42~52 USD (though for the limited quantities available, I ended up paying $69). Curiosity got the best of me for seeing how well this lowest-end Alder Lake part performs under Ubuntu Linux.
AMDVLK 2022.Q1.2 Released With Vulkan 1.3 Support
AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver derived from their Radeon Software driver sources but using the LLVM shader compiler back-end is out with a new release. AMD is ready with day-after support for the newly-launched Vulkan 1.3 specification for AMDVLK...
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