Phoronix

Besides all of the Linux-focused talks at the annual FOSDEM conference, another favorite track of mine is that on micro-kernels and other operating systems. While there wasn't the GNU/Hurd status update in 2022 as there has been in some recent years, there was a talk over GNU/Hurd using NetBSD kernel drivers in order to expand its hardware coverage...

For use with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Oracle this week released Oracle Linux 8.5 onto the Microsoft Store...

There's been some activity on AMD open-source firmware support for newer hardware platforms but for those wanting a fully open-source firmware stack, there remains work on older generations of AMD server platforms. Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented today at FOSDEM 2022 as to the current state AMD open-source firmware efforts around Coreboot...

Microsoft continues work on their controversial "DXGKRNL" driver they hope to mainline into the Linux kernel for benefiting their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) efforts...

Ahead of the Steam Deck shipping later this month, here is where the Steam on Linux marketshare currently stands...

KDE continues seeing a lot of Wayland fixes landing as well as general crash fixes and addressing other glitches with this popular desktop environment...

As a particularly important move for Linux gamers and enthusiasts where you may be riding frequent Git builds of new Mesa graphics drivers or even the bi-weekly point releases - compared to the multi-week/monthly update regiment for Windows graphics drivers - Valve's Steam client will now flush its stale shader cache upon GPU/driver changes. This is important for conserving disk space especially where storage constraints are possible like with the Steam Deck...

While it's not the same as sitting in Brussels and enjoying some Belgian beers while socializing in-person with developers, the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is happening this weekend online...

In a short period of time Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D driver has gone from implementing OpenGL 3.3 atop the Direct3D 12 interface to now having working OpenGL 4.2 support...

As part of an effort to update LLVM Clang's "-mtune" handling to cater to newer processors, AMD Zen processors with LLVM/Clang 15 later this year will be able to enjoy faster and more accurate square root calculations with tuning to use SQRTSS/SQRTPS instructions...

Libinput 1.19 launched last September with high resolution scroll wheel support finally in place while libinput 1.20 is in preparation for release that improves that functionality. Libinput 1.20 also makes other improvements to this widely-used input library on the Linux desktop that is leveraged by both X.Org and Wayland based environments...

Back in the day I enjoyed Zenwalk as a great desktop-focused, ready out-of-the-box Linux distribution built atop Slackware. After not hearing much from the project in a while, I am glad to see it's still going strong and they have today issued Zenwalk 15 that is built atop the newly-released Slackware 15.0...

Ahead of the planned release of Qt 6.3.0 next month, The Qt Company today has made available the first Qt 6.3 beta...

When it comes to small form factor (SFF) industrial PCs and IoT computers, it's been an area where Intel has traditionally dominated and served quite well. But now with the continued success of AMD's Ryzen processors, we are beginning to see more AMD-powered industrial computer solutions become available such as the recent OnLogic ML100 series with AMD SoC options. I've been testing out the OnLogic ML100G-41 powered by a Ryzen 7 4800U SoC for many weeks now and this fanless, industrial-grade computer has been running very well for a diverse variety of workloads.

This week marked the release of LibreOffice 7.3 but already for LibreOffice 7.4 coming at the end of summer is a change many users will enjoy: the open-source office suite has finally decided to support the WebP image format...

GStreamer 1.20 is out as stable as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework...

Following this week's release of Chrome 98 stable, Google has now promoted Chrome 99 to beta status...

Slackware 14 released back in 2012 and has finally been succeded by Slackware 15.0 as stable! Slackware remains the oldest, still-maintained Linux distribution that has been around since 1993...

Back in November AMD announced the MI200 accelerator that has seen its Linux open-source driver support developed under the "Aldebaran" codename going back to February of last year. The AMD developers are now removing the "experimental" flag from that Aldebaran class GPU support...

Intel today published their annual security report that provides various insights into the different security vulnerabilities disclosed and mitigated over the past calendar year...

A few years ago Mozilla started Firefox Reality as a browser focused on AR/VR mixed reality. Like Mozilla's other failed projects, Firefox Reality is being tossed into the scrap bin next to the likes of Firefox OS and Firefox Send. But thanks to the nature of open-source, the work is being continued on independently by Igalia with the new Wolvic project...

PipeWire 0.3.45 is out today as the newest update to this audio/video stream server that is becoming increasingly common on the Linux desktop...

Recently I tested the Intel Celeron G6900 Alder Lake processor as a $40~60 CPU and the lowest-end SKU as part of the latest-generation Intel desktop CPU line-up. Those tests were carried out on Ubuntu Linux (as usual) for that dual-core processor and was an interesting little processor for the price and for the lack of any AMD Zen 3 competition currently at that low price point. If needing to make daily use of such an Intel Celeron system, switching out your Linux distribution can help. In this article are benchmarks of the Celeron G6900 across Arch-based Manjaro, Intel's Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, Ubuntu 22.04 daily, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Not only is Microsoft after having OpenGL and OpenCL layered atop Direct3D 12 for usage by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) or where the host has no native GL/CL drivers available, but they are also after Vulkan support on top of D3D12. It's looking like Mesa may be close to merging the "Dozen" driver that provides this preliminary Vulkan on Direct3D 12 support...

It took them until 2022, but Arch Linux now provides debug packages for easing the process of debugging software packages rather than having to recompile the software yourself with debug symbols included...

Version 2.35 of the GNU C Library (Glibc) is now available with a variety of changes to this crucial low-level library for Linux systems...

While LLVM 14 should be released in March, LLVM 13.0.1 is out this week as the first and only planned point release to the LLVM 13 stable series...

After a three week delay to the Mesa 22.0 schedule to allow Vulkan 1.3 to land among other last minute features, the code was branched today that marks the end of feature development on this quarterly Mesa3D driver stack. Mesa 22.0 stable should be out in a few weeks time and with it comes many new features to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems but of growing use on Windows with the D3D12 driver and other platforms...

While the Raspberry Pi 3 and newer have featured 64-bit Cortex CPU cores and even the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is 64-bit-capable, Raspbian OS as the official Raspberry Pi operating system has remained 32-bit. Finally in 2022 they now have an official 64-bit build...

Quietly making its v1.0 debut today is system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems now has experimental support for mesh shaders that work with their forthcoming Intel Arc DG2/Alchemist graphics cards...

Intel today is announcing Project Circuit Breaker as a broadening of its bug bounty program for "elite hackers" to help discover areas for improvement within Intel's hardware/software security...

With NVIDIA's newly-introduced 510 Linux driver series paired with the latest XWayland and a modern Wayland compositor like the newest GNOME/Mutter packages, the NVIDIA (X)Wayland experience is in great shape and delivering comparable performance to a traditional X.Org session. The NVIDIA Wayland support with GBM usage has stabilized and appears to be in good shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are some benchmarks of the NVIDIA 510 driver on the current state of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.3 as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

The Linux kernel patches that alow bringing up x86_64 CPU cores in parallel when booting the system have been revised for faster boot times on today's systems from high core count desktops to massive servers...

ACPI Platform Profile support on Linux has been useful for catering to balancing your power or performance preferences with modern laptops on Linux. It has worked well in general across various devices tested but it turns out to be a dud currently when it comes to AMD Ryzen powered Lenovo systems...

LLVM release manager Tom Stellard has branched the LLVM 14.0 code and that of its sub-projects like Clang within the mono repository. As such, LLVM 14.0 feature development is now over with the main Git branch working towards what will become LLVM 15.0 later this calendar year...

Trisquel 10.0 was released on Tuesday as the latest major release of this operating system that is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. While it has the blessing of the FSF, it's a bit behind on the software feature front...

Weston 10.0 has been released as the newest feature update to Wayland's reference compositor that often works as a proving grounds and compositor showcasing shiny new features for Wayland...

Chrome 98 is available today as Google's second web browser update of the new year. The Chrome 98 changes are mostly on the developer-side but with some user-impacting differences...

Linux 5.16.5 is out today and making it a notable point release is it fixed up the rather botched state of the Btrfs file-system code for the v5.16 kernel...

System76 is today announcing their latest AMD laptop in the form of the Kudu with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and up to 64GB of RAM...

A change currently being evaluated for Intel's "i915" Linux kernel graphics driver would make it easier for building driver support for their forthcoming discrete graphics products for targeting other non-x86 CPU architectures like Arm..

While it was just yesterday NVIDIA released the 470.103.01 Linux driver, today they have made public the 510.47.03 Linux driver as their first stable version in the NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series...

While Intel has not publicly announced their plans around Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), the Linux kernel patches allowing activation of licensed CPU features is continuing to move forward toward mainline integration...

Last year Blender 3.0 added AMD HIP acceleration to its Cycles X render code with OpenCL having been removed. That AMD HIP support for Blender 3.0 was limited to Windows with plans to then enable Linux support for Blender 3.1. Sadly due to AMD driver delays, that HIP Linux support is postponed to Blender 3.2...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for delivering firmware updates with the fwupd client for system and component firmware updates from Linux continues experiencing massive growth. Q4'2021 by far saw the most usage ever and that has continued into 2022 with serving more than two million firmware downloads the past month...

The Qt Company continues to look for ways to diversify its product offering and improve its financial performance. In addition to the recent change making it easier to add ads into Qt apps, The Qt Company announced today a simplification of their commercial licensing...

Valve's Gamescope as a Wayland compositor for running games on Linux now has integrated support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)...

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...