Phoronix

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

Linus Torvalds' schedule due to travels remains a bit off and as such Linux 5.17-rc2 is already available this morning...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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)...