Phoronix

For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases...

Vulkan 1.2.203 is out with many fixes/updates to the specification documentation to end out the year as well as introducing three new extensions...

For those with extra time around the end-of-year holidays, helloSystem 0.7 is now available as the newest update to this leading BSD-based desktop operating system that is inspired by Apple macOS but powered by FreeBSD...

An Alibaba engineer is proposing a standalone SM3 crypto library within the Linux kernel and with optimizations for x86_64 AVX usage nets up to a 38% performance improvement for this crypto algorithm...

OpenBLAS as the popular, open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library implementation posted its newest release on Sunday...

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.16 for testing this Christmas week...

Making a Sunday debut are the amd-pstate v6 patches as the latest iteration of this work for improving the AMD CPU frequency control behavior on Linux for more optimized power efficiency with modern Zen 2 / Zen 3 series (and future) processors...

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products...

Coming as a surprise to end out the week is confirmation that the lead developer and architect for Intel's Linux Vulkan driver has left the company...

Last year with Linux 5.10 FUSE added DAX support for use with VirtIO-FS. Like with DAX for other file-systems, enabling this direct access mode allows bypassing the page cache. For use-cases when running on persistent memory like devices or VirtIO, having this direct access to the storage device can be beneficial for performance. With Linux 5.17 FUSE is expanding the DAX support to allow per-inode control as well...

Due to changes with the upstream GRUB 2.06 bootloader, Ubuntu developers are figuring out how they are going to be managing dual-boot/multi-boot scenarios moving forward with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Debian 11.2 is out today as the newest point release to "Bullseye" that premiered earlier this year...

Display support for the Mediatek MT8192 SoC is expected to land for the upcoming Linux 5.17 SoC...

While there hasn't been much to talk about Unigine recently when it comes to Linux games and they seem to place less emphasis these days on Unigine as a game engine, this cross-platform SDK/engine continues to be visually quite stunning, their Linux support remains in good shape, and they appear to be enjoying very successful efforts on the commercial simulation side. Unigine 2.15 was released this week as the latest iteration of their engine...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system developed by the community with an aim for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows is out with a big update. The last release was ReactOS 0.4.13 all the way back in April 2020 while this week has been succeeded by the big ReactOS 0.4.14 update...

The ENQCMD functionality that is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was disabled earlier this year for being "broken beyond repair". But now ahead of Sapphire Rapids beginning to ramp up in the coming months, Intel open-source engineers believe they have improved the code that the ENQCMD instruction usage could be re-enabled for the Linux kernel...

KDE Wayland users have many reasons to be grateful this Christmas with yet more improvements having landed for the Plasma Wayland session. Plus KDE's Konsole terminal emulator can now scroll about twice as fast as previously...

While now half-way through December, Microsoft today published their November 2021 update to CBL-Mariner 1.0, their in-house Linux distribution...

With Wine 7.0 gearing up for release in January, since last week we have been under a feature freeze and weekly release candidates. Wine 7.0-rc2 is out now with more fixes in battening up this next open-source release for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux / macOS / BSDs...

After the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver changes intended for Linux 5.16 weren't pulled due to timing, they are back around for Linux 5.17 with most notably the open-source Tegra driver feature pull request introducing NVDEC video decoding...

It's been a while since last comparing the Apple macOS performance to Linux since in part because the newer Apple Silicon (M1) hardware isn't yet in good enough shape for performance tests on Linux. But for those wondering about the Intel-powered Macs and how the performance of the latest Linux distributions compare to that of macOS 12 Monterey, here are some benchmarks of the new macOS 12.1 up against Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

Following the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 Windows driver that released earlier in the month, this week brought the similar quarterly enterprise graphics driver update to Linux...

Since early 2020 Micron went public with HSE as an open-source storage engine for SSDs and persistent memory. The HSE key-value store proved to be extremely performant with the likes of a MongoDB implementation but required changes to the Linux kernel that made it initially a higher barrier for entry. HSE 2.0 shipped in October that no longer required those kernel changes while still offering blistering fast performance. Now to round out the year they have HSE 2.1...

After being more than ten years in the making after being started by Fujitsu engineers in 2008 but never going through all the steps for upstreaming, thanks to a SUSE engineer the Linux 5.17 kernel will finally have the Xen USB virtual host driver...

Not only is Loongson working on bringing up LoongArch ISA support for the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components, but the Chinese company has now laid out their plans for LoongArch on LLVM...

After introducing a lot of new AMDGPU feature code in prior weeks to DRM-Next for introduction with Linux 5.17, AMD developers have shifted their DRM-Next focus now onto driver fixes ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Following the Richard Stallman situation, board members leaving, projects seeking greater transparency from the FSF, and other issues within the Free Software Foundation the past two years, the FSF has finally adopted a new governance framework for board members...

Already a lot of DRM display/graphics driver changes have been queued into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window while now is the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next material. DRM-Misc maintainer Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE commented, "every single patchset in this [pull request] is awesome."..

When it comes to the Radeon ROCm GPU software support AMD only officially supports it on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, RHEL / CentOS, and Ubuntu LTS releases. But Arch Linux already makes it fairly easy to deploy with their third-party packages and now Fedora and Debian have developers also eyeing possible packaging of the Radeon Open eCosystem software for more easily deploying on those distributions...

AMD has made public the AMD Accelerator Cloud. No, they aren't getting into the cloud game per se, but rather allowing a place for customers to try out new EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators running with the latest ROCm software components...

Earlier this month marked the general availability of CentOS Stream 9 as the bleeding-edge of Red hat Enterprise Linux 9 development. Since then I've been running benchmarks of CentOS Stream 9 and with modern hardware it's been offering some nice performance upgrades over CentOS Stream 8 / RHEL8 especially with modern hardware platforms like Intel Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" servers. Here are benchmarks of CentOS Stream8, CentOS Stream 9, Intel's Clear Linux, Fedora Server 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 on both AMD and Intel servers.

GNOME-focused Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical has proposed an optimization that could help with running NVIDIA graphics on high refresh rate displays...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 22.0 features are more Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements to help with gaming performance...

Resizable BAR support (also known as ReBAR / AMD Smart Access Memory) has been popular with gamers for supported configurations for being able to improve GPU performance. Intel is now working on enabling the Linux kernel to support Resizable BAR when in the context of I/O Virtualization...

While CUPS 2.4 was recently released as the first big update in years and since OpenPrinting took over upstream development, CUPS founder Michael Sweet continues concurrently developing PAPPL as a modern, open-source printer appication framework. Wednesday marked the release of PAPPL 1.1...

Glibc 2.35 is introducing the new tunable glibc.malloc.hugetlb that can help with improving system performance for some workloads making use of this tunable, depending upon your kernel's hugepages configuration...

Valve yesterday introduced experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an alternative to the long-standing OpenGL path for running CS:GO on Linux. Curious about the performance implications of CS:GO with Vulkan, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Intel's CM Compiler for their "C for Metal" programming language has been updated for various new GPU targets, including not only Xe HPC "Ponte Vecchio" but also a Ponte Vecchio XT variant...

Following yesterday's disclosure of four new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities that could lead to local privilege escalation, X.Org Server 21.1.2 is now available with those security fixes plus other changes...

Intel Linux engineers have posted a new set of patches enabling the Graphics Security Controller "GSC" support under Linux as a chassis controller for discrete graphics cards...

The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021...

Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag...

While POWER CPUs have generally been well received by the free software community for being open-source friendly especially with the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM's latest-generation POWER10 processors are continuing to be an upset...

Back in early 2019 Microsoft announced Windows Terminal as a new terminal for Windows that seemed rather Linux-inspired and supported tabs and other modern functionality. Beginning in 2022, Microsoft will make Windows Terminal their default terminal program on Windows 11...

QEMU 6.2 is now officially available as the newest feature release for this widely used key open-source component to the Linux virtualization stack...

Following recent Steam database entries suggesting as much, Valve this evening formally pushed out a new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive build introducing initial Vulkan API rendering support...

Amazon has passed along word that they are hiring for Linux gaming engineers that are experienced in the likes of Valve's DXVK and Proton efforts as well as being experienced with the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Vulkan, and more...

The first alpha release of Weston 10.0 is now available as the next feature update to Wayland's reference compositor...

For those looking at upgrading your business notebook this holiday season, here are our first benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U mobile processor under Linux using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. For ~$1299 USD this holiday season on sale, this Linux-friendly ThinkPad offers a lot with the 8-core / 16-thread Zen 3 processor with Vega graphics, 32GB LPDDR4X 4266MHz system memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, 4K IPS display, and legendary ThinkPad build quality.

Canonical is looking to increase the outlook for Ubuntu on FPGAs and has announced a collaborative partnership with Xilinx to get the Linux distribution working on more of their hardware...