on (#5TP09)
Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux...
Phoronix
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| Updated | 2026-02-18 10:45 |
on (#5TNW0)
After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game...
on (#5TNNT)
Google this afternoon promoted the Chrome 97 web browser to its stable series...
on (#5TND1)
While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance...
on (#5TNA8)
Intel is using CES 2022 to announce the 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors led by the H-series processors, new 35-Watt and 65-Watt 12th Gen Core desktop CPUs, an updated Intel Evo specification, and an update on their DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics efforts.
on (#5TN3J)
As expected, NVIDIA has used its CES 2022 address to announce the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti albeit in brief form. The GeForce RTX 3050 was also announced...
on (#5TN09)
AMD CEO Lisa Su is beginning her CES 2022 keynote right now. Lisa will be talking up the company's consumer wares for the year with a particular focus expected on the Ryzen 6000 series mobile "Rembrandt" processors and AMD CPUs with 3D V-Cache.
on (#5TMQE)
For software like Mozilla Firefox that relies on the cross-vendor Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for hardware GPU-based video decoding and doesn't support NVIDIA's proprietary NVDEC interface for video decoding, there is an in-development VA-API implementation that works atop NVIDIA NVDEC...
on (#5TMNK)
Back in 2020 Microsoft announced their "Pluton" security chip that woulld be coming to future AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm processors. The Pluton security processor is designed to improve the system security under Windows and now we find out that AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors will be the first featuring this security feature that may prove controversial to Linux/open-source fans...
on (#5TMKJ)
Last week I called attention to the new "x86-android-tablets" driver being prepared for introduction in Linux 5.17. That driver aims to fix up the mess of various x86 Android-focused tablets failing to run off the mainline Linux kernel or having various device issues in doing so. Since that prior article, more patches have been posted to address additional tablet issues...
on (#5TMKK)
With more organizations such as Alibaba configuring their servers to share CPU cores/resources among applications these days rather than exclusively assigning CPU cores to individual applications/tasks, the Chinese company is proposing a new "group balancer" for the Linux kernel scheduler...
on (#5TMKM)
A decade old patch is set to be mainlined in the upcoming Linux 5.17 that has been carried by Google's Chrome OS kernel build for years and can help with security on Linux systems not relying upon systemd's udev...
on (#5TM7B)
It was nearly one year ago that Arm announced the Armv9 architecture as the successor to ARMv8 that was introduced a decade ago. Since then Arm has been working on adding Armv9 support to the open-source compilers such as GCC and LLVM/Clang. That initial Armv9 support has been in place for months now while on the LLVM/Clang today it received support for Armv9.3-A as the latest iteration...
on (#5TM08)
Next month marks two years since AMD introduced the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread processor. All of our testing of the 3990X on Linux over the past two years has been with the System76 Thelio Major, which continues holding up well with that US-assembled workstation with hand-crafted enclosure from Colorado. With System76 having recently released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the latest update to their Ubuntu Linux derived operating system and upcoming two year anniversary of the 3990X, it made for an interesting time to see how the performance of the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT within that workstation has evolved.
on (#5TKYQ)
Starting off a new year Intel's open-source compute stack developers have published the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) 1.0.9933 release that is used for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero support on Linux and also used by their graphics driver on Windows...
on (#5TKMM)
One of the great successes for Arch Linux in 2021 was "archinstall" debuting on the Arch Linux install media as a convenient and quick installer for this enthusiast-minded Linux distribution. This year that easy Arch Linux installer is getting into even better shape...
on (#5TKGH)
A patch series sent out by IBM would introduce a new "LEGACY_PCI" Kconfig option for gating legacy PCI device support, including PCI devices attached to PCI-to-PCIe bridges and PCIe devices using legacy I/O spaces...
on (#5TKDY)
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham who publishes the weekly KDE desktop development summaries has published the 2022 road-map for what he sees as the major undertakings this year by this community-driven, open-source desktop environment...
on (#5TKF1)
The mdadm utility for managing Linux software RAID arrays is out with a new release -- its first in more than three years...
on (#5TK40)
Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell"...
on (#5TK41)
Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing...
on (#5TK31)
It's coming a few days late due to New Year's, but Wine 7.0-rc4 is out as the latest weekly release candidate for this forthcoming yearly stable release. Wine 7.0 is the imminent feature update for this open-source software allowing Windows games/applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...
on (#5TJYX)
In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default...
on (#5TJQ2)
Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux...
on (#5TJMN)
The LLVM compiler stack saw record growth in 2021 both with the most amount of new code introduced in any single year as well as the most contributors per year this open-source project has ever seen. Even aside from the development metrics, LLVM had a pretty rocking 2021...
on (#5TJKC)
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers...
on (#5TJKD)
A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level...
on (#5TJJJ)
While the Linux 5.16 kernel release and in turn the Linux 5.17 merge window isn't happening for another week, the media subsystem pull request for v5.17 has already been mailed out with its various feature changes for this next cycle...
on (#5TJ4X)
There were a ton of exciting kernel improvements merged in 2021 as well as introducing new hardware support and more. But for as exciting as the year was, it actually ticked lower than usual on both a commit and line count basis. Here is a look at some of the popular kernel topics in 2021 as well as a look at the yearly Git development statistics...
on (#5THXW)
For those wanting to enjoy the F1 2021 racing game on Linux via Valve's Steam Play, it's slowly getting into good shape. The latest enhancement is on the Radeon Vulkan driver side with Mesa's RADV adding a workaround targeting the game...
on (#5THWZ)
Haiku as the open-source operating system in development for two decades as the inspirational successor to BeOS is kicking off 2022 by.... beginning to be able to run Windows applications via Wine. There is great progress being made in porting Wine to running on Haiku...
on (#5THX0)
Since we are all about performance and numbers, here is a look at the 2021 statistics for OpenBenchmarking.org itself as the online complementary component to the Phoronix Test Suite...
on (#5THW4)
Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available...
on (#5THW5)
KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations...
on (#5THJE)
It's now another year in the books and in just six months and a few days will mark 18 years since starting Phoronix.com and 14 years of developing the public, open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software...
on (#5THFR)
Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.
on (#5THE0)
GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit...
on (#5TH6J)
Thanks to Valve engineer Timur Kristóf and other open-source developers involved, Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is ending 2021 on a high note: mesh shaders was just merged!..
on (#5TH6K)
Today is the unfortunate day marking CentOS Linux 8 reaching end-of-life status as a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8...
on (#5TH1G)
Arch Linux had a pretty great year with introducing "Archinstall" as part of the official install media as a new, optional installer for conveniently installing the distribution to Valve choosing Arch Linux as their new SteamOS 3.0 base that will power their forthcoming Steam Deck handheld game console...
on (#5TH04)
For those running Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle is set to bring a few improvements to the "thinkpad_acpi" driver...
on (#5TH05)
It was just this month that Mold 1.0 premiered as a very promising, high performance linker alternative to GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers. GCC 12 added support for Mold this week and now for ending out the year Mold 1.0.1 has been released...
on (#5TGYS)
Each year it's interesting to see how Microsoft's usage and contributions around Linux and open-source evolve. In a short period of time they go from sponsoring coffee at LinuxTag to enabling .NET and more on Linux to now in 2021 having made public their CBL-Mariner Linux distribution, supporting more features like eBPF and IO_uring on Windows, and continue heavily investing in the Windows Subsystem for Linux...
on (#5TH06)
Merged yesterday into the LibreOffice code-base was introducing yet another graphics drawing back-end for this open-source office suite...
on (#5TGRJ)
Back in late 2020 Intel's programming manuals detailed the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface for the CPU to provide guidance to the kernel's scheduler on optimal task placement of workloads. While marketed as Thread Director with the new 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, that hardware feedback interface support is getting squared away for the Linux kernel to improve the support for these newest processors...
on (#5TGPE)
Queued today within the Linux's random.git repository for the /dev/random and /dev/urandom code is support for using BLAKE2s rather than SHA1 when hashing the entropy pool. This in turn is a big performance speed-up in addition to being more secure...
on (#5TGK8)
Fedora had another successful year and anecdotally enthusiasm around the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution grew a lot this year among Linux power users. As has been the case for years, Fedora releases have been among the first to feature new Linux innovations from the desktop down the stack -- many of which have been spearheaded by Red Hat engineers. Helping its cause for the past several years is that they have managed to deliver releases on-time (or close to it) and haven't been like some of the past distant releases that were rather buggy and other headaches stemming from the constant flow of changes. Fedora 34 and Fedora 35 this year were great releases and continued pushing the distribution on an upward trajectory...
on (#5TGCH)
With a few lines of changed code updating some parameters, AMD Radeon graphics processors having the VCE video encoder block will be able to enjoy better performance...
on (#5TG20)
AMD this week released AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their last open-source Vulkan driver version of the year and with it came finally fixing the poor performance seen by that driver when running under Wayland such as with Ubuntu 21.04 and newer. Indeed, my tests have confirmed the AMDVLK performance now being in far better shape under Wayland, but is it enough to better compete now with Mesa's RADV alternative Vulkan driver? Here are fresh benchmarks.
on (#5TG21)
Ubuntu and parent company Canonical had another great year not only on the Linux desktop but continuing its commercial successes around the server, cloud, and IoT sectors too. Ubuntu 21.04 and 21.10 delivered new features across all fronts this year and developers are now busy preparing for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release next spring...