Phoronix

Released this week was Rav1e 0.5 as the newest feature release for this Rust-written AV1 video encoder backed by Xiph.Org and self-proclaimed to be the world's "fastest and safest" AV1 encoder...

The USB and Thunderbolt updates for the Linux 5.16 kernel have arrived. This time around the changes are on the smaller side but there are two additions worth mentioning...

The "char/misc" changes have landed in Linux 5.16 as the catch-all area for code not fitting more appropriately within another subsystem or being a portion of the kernel that's too small for submitting pull requests directly to Linus Torvalds. For Linux 5.16, the IIO code has moved from being part of the staging area also maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman to now being under the char/misc umbrella. Additionally, another big item is the Intel Habana Labs driver updates...

While we eagerly await the release of Godot 4 as a massive update to this leading open-source game engine, out this weekend is Godot 3.4 as a rather significant update to Godot 3.x with a number of new features and improvements...

Proposed Linux kernel patches by a Google engineer -- based on existing functionality found within Android and Chrome OS kernel builds -- would allow Linux's DRM display/GPU drivers to more easily know when system input events occur...

There isn't any shiny new drivers part of the kernel's staging area for Linux 5.16 but exciting from a maintenance perspective is a rather healthy clean-up affecting multiple areas of this "proving grounds" area of the kernel...

Sent in on Friday by Bjorn Helgaas were all of the PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 5.16 merge window...

KDE developers began November working on yet more Plasma Wayland session fixes and other enhancements to their open-source desktop environment...

Today marks nine years already since Valve began rolling out their Steam Linux beta client after a very exciting summer. While the initial Steam on Linux excitement phased out a bit after Steam Machines didn't materialize, as we approach a decade with Steam on Linux it's easily as exciting as ever thanks to Steam Play / Proton for allowing massive amounts of Windows games to run on Linux and the imminent release of the Steam Deck that has fueled renewed interest around Linux gaming...

Back in September it was announced that the BattlEye anti-cheat technology would support Proton with an emphasis on the forthcoming Steam Deck. Now as a nice present for Steam's 9th birthday on Linux, that BattlEye support is coming together...

Wine 6.21 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux...

Kent Overstreet who has been working relentlessly on Bcachefs for over a half-decade now issued his latest status update on this Linux file-system born out of the kernel's block cache code...

Published yesterday was the Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K Linux review looking at the exciting performance uplift provided by Alder Lake. One of the areas only talked about briefly in yesterday's article were the UHD Graphics 770 found with these new desktop processors, due to time constraints with only having a few days so far for carrying out tests. Today the initial batch of UHD Graphics 770 / ADL-S GT1 Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks have wrapped up to show how the Intel graphics performance compares to prior generation Rocket Lake as well as AMD's Ryzen 7 5700G.

The HID subsystem updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.16 merge window with some notable improvements for Linux gamers...

After eight years in development, the LXQt desktop that was created by the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt open-source desktop projects is celebrating its v1.0 release...

As another "first on RADV" for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan open-source driver compared to AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver options, there is an early branch providing primitive, experimental support for Vulkan Video acceleration...

The Linux 5.16 kernel is doing away with hardware support for the MIPS-based Netlogic Microsystems SoCs, the network processors developed prior to being acquired by Broadcom a decade ago...

AMD traditionally has been updating its AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver sources publicly on a (bi)weekly basis, but that went off the wagon recently with not seeing any updates since the end of September. That changed this morning with the publishing of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1...

With the plans to release Wayland 1.20 before Christmas, Wayland 1.20 Alpha was released on Thursday to kick off the start of the release process...

While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration...

With the embargo lifted following this morning's Intel Core i5 12600K + Core i9 12900K Linux review, I've begun uploading more public test data to OpenBenchmarking.org and making my earlier test results public. With that and initial data flowing in from others in the community, here is some more data to poke through if interested in Alder Lake on Linux...

Microsoft's latest surprise is adding native Linux support to their Endpoint Manager software...

With the Intel 12th Gen Core processors shipping today along with the new line-up of Z690 motherboards, the review embargo lifts for talking about these Intel "Alder Lake" processors. While by now you've likely heard a lot about Intel Alder Lake on Windows and various leaked benchmarks with Windows 11, how does these processors with the new hybrid architecture work and perform on Linux? Here are the initial benchmarks and support information for Intel's Core i5 12600K and Core i9 12900K processors under Ubuntu Linux.

Red Hat engineer Michel Dänzer has uncovered and addressed another performance shortcoming within X.Org's XWayland code...

Facebook's BOLT project for optimizing the performance out of compiled binaries is nearing the point of being added to LLVM's official source tree with its mono repository...

All of the Arm SoC/platform changes were merged on Wednesday evening for the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle...

Mesa 21.3 as the final feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers isn't yet ready to go as some blocker bugs persist, but available now is the fourth weekly release candidate...

Sent in on Tuesday and since merged to the mainline Linux 5.16 code-base were the power management updates and accompanying ACPI and thermal changes...

The Linux sound subsystem is seeing some useful and significant additions with the Linux 5.16 kernel...

Microsoft today released its monthly update to CBL-Mariner, its internal Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes at the Windows company...

The "AMDGPU" kernel graphics driver has been ported and pulled into the DragonFlyBSD operating system...

In addition to IO_uring improvements in Linux 5.16 itself, the Security Enhanced Linux "SELinux" patches for this new kernel cycle bring controls and auditing around IO_uring...

Red Hat today announced the first public beta of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0...

Along with the work-in-progress new Ubuntu desktop installer, another GUI project being pursued by Canonical going into the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle is the "firmware-updater" as a firmware updating GUI solution written in the Flutter toolkit and Dart...

All of the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel graphics/display driver updates were submitted and already merged for the very exciting Linux 5.16 kernel cycle. There is a lot of good stuff this round especially when it comes to the open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers...

For those enjoying Steam Remote Play in-home streaming functionality, the latest Steam client beta now supports making use of the Video Acceleration API for encoding...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.16 kernel and with this comes sensor support for some additional ASRock and ASUS motherboards...

A set of patches were posted this past week by Intel open-source driver engineer Francisco Jerez with pixel pipeline optimizations that help all DG2/Alchemist platforms with double digit percentage improvements...

Along with the Btrfs updates, other Linux file-systems have also been sending in their improvements destined for the Linux 5.16 kernel...

A number of System76 laptops saw their Coreboot open-source firmware ports merged to the mainline code-base today...

Last month Apple announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs while already the very latest Linux patches originally written for the Apple M1 that launched last year paired with some small changes is allowing the open-source platform to boot on the M1 Pro MacBook...

Microsoft has submitted their set of Hyper-V hypervisor updates today for the Linux 5.16 merge window. This time around it's noteworthy with the initial enablement work around Hyper-V "Isolation VM" support...

The "sched/core" scheduler updates landed on Monday into the Linux 5.16 kernel. Notable this pull request is the cluster-aware scheduling support...

Fedora 35 is now officially available today as the latest major release of this Linux distribution developed by Red Hat and the open-source community. Fedora 35 is another very rich feature update at the forefront of Linux innovations from servers to the desktop...

Canonical has begun publishing Ubuntu install images that are optimized for use on next-generation Intel IoT platforms...

Firefox 94.0 is now available and for a change it's quite exciting on the Linux front...

The Khronos Group this morning is rolling out the provisional specification for ANARI 1.0, its newest royalty-free, industry-standard API...

The Btrfs file-system continues seeing new performance optimizations and other work, thanks in part to the renewed interest around the file-system with Fedora Workstation continuing to use it by default along with openSUSE and other Linux distributions...

Vulkan 1.2.197 is out with a variety of documentation updates, clarifications to the specification, and other work. Plus there is one new extension this time around...

Given the wide range of hardware running Linux and especially Linux being dominant in the data center, the networking changes each kernel cycle remain quite vibrant. Linux 5.16 is no exception with the main feature pull sent in on Monday for all the networking updates...