Phoronix

For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series...

The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple...

Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite...

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41...

While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API...

Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux...

After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more...

It looks like 2022 is when we will start seeing DisplayPort 2.0 hardware broadly available... It was just earlier this week I wrote about AMD working on DisplayPort 2.0 for their open-source Radeon Linux driver and now coincidentally today Intel has begun their open-source Linux graphics driver enablement for DP 2.0...

It's been over two years since The Khronos Group acknowledged they were working on safety critical Vulkan and now finally the 1.0 release is approaching for this graphics/compute interface suitable for safety critical systems...

Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program...

This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 "Bullseye" as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" hardware.

A set of two patches posted this week would allow the Linux kernel to be easily built with the different x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels supported by the latest LLVM Clang and GCC compilers...

Six dozen patches working on the PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure for real-time kernels is now queued up in TIP's "locking/core" branch and will presumably be sent in for the Linux 5.15 merge window coming up quickly...

In addition to Tuesday seeing the Zink sub-allocator merged for sharply improving the performance of this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa, the Zink Gallium3D code subsequently merged support for OpenGL compatibility contexts...

Sent out last year was a "request for comments" on "Maple Tree" as a new data structure for the Linux kernel. The latest version of the Maple Tree patches were sent out today with mixed results but for where gains are being made they can be quite significant...

Mesa's Zink Gallium3D code for implementing OpenGL-over-Vulkan can now run a heck of a lot faster with the newest Mesa 21.3 code...

Manjaro 21.1 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux based operating system...

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner Linux distribution as their platform within the company that is being used for various cloud and edge computing use-cases among other purposes...

Following last week's Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, here are benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT / RX 6700 XT / RX 6800 XT graphics cards across all of the Vulkan driver options available to Linux users.

The change led by AMD engineers for adding AV1 VA-API acceleration support to the Gallium3D "VA" state tracker front-end has landed in Mesa 21.3...

The LLVMpipe driver providing a generic OpenGL implementation that's CPU-accelerated for Mesa - and more performant than alternatives thanks to LLVM - can now support OpenGL 4.5 compatibility profile contexts...

While getting late in the cycle, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved some additional changes for Fedora 35 due out this fall...

Ubuntu developers acknowledge "delaying this for a long time" but for Ubuntu 21.10 they are planning to ship its systemd package with the unified cgroup hierarchy (Cgroups v2) by default...

The latest feature display work to happen for the AMDGPU kernel driver since the debut of FreeSync HDMI in Linux 5.13 is around DisplayPort 2.0 support and specifically the SST UHBR10 handling...

Git 2.33 is out this evening as the latest stable update to this immensely successful open-source distributed revision control system...

Last month Intel began posting the developer documentation around AVX-512 FP16 support coming with Sapphire Rapids and initially accompanied by GCC compiler patches along with LLVM/Clang. While that GNU Compiler Collection support around AVX-512 FP16 has yet to be merged, the LLVM Clang support for this next iteration of AVX-512 has begun landing...

Tesseract as the leading open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine that employs neural networks for converting images/scans of text into actual recognized text is nearing its 5.0 release...

Intel just announced the new brand they will use for their forthcoming high performance discrete graphics solutions...

While Fedora currently allows restarting of system services automatically when upgrading the packages for those services, there hasn't been that capability for user services to automatically restart as part of RPM package upgrades. But now approved for Fedora 35 is that change...

The Mediatek Direct Rendering Manager driver updates slated for Linux 5.15 were sent out this weekend...

Not only did Debian 11 make it out this weekend, but Slackware 15 is finally up to its release candidate phase as the next major installment of this long-running Linux distribution...

The Maui open-source user interface framework and Maui Apps are out with a new release for those interested in this framework and applications that are designed to work well cross-device as well as largely working cross-platform too...

Kdenlive 21.08 is now available as the newest feature upgrade to KDE's non-linear video editor...

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.14-rc6 as the latest weekly test release of Linux 5.14 that should go gold around the end of August...

With proper heatsinks becoming all the more important with speedy PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSDs to avoid thermal throttling, SilverStone has been among the vendors offering after-market aluminum heatsinks designed for M.2 2280 drives. The SilverStone TP04 is a simple but effective aluminum alloy SSD cooling kit for about $17 USD.

While Linux 5.12 saw initial support merged for the Apple M1, it was quite the basic support with more robust support still to come. Besides the graphics support being a large work-in-progress, one of the areas now coming about is the new PCI Express driver that is necessary for supporting more functionality of this driver...

If you have noticed grep regressing performance-wise in recent releases, you may want to upgrade to GNU Grep 3.7 released this weekend as it fixes a nasty performance regression...

OpenRazer 3.1 is now available as the newest version of this open-source, third-party solution for enabling Razer devices under Linux...

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel six years ago was the LightNVM subsystem as part of Linux 4.4 LTS around "Open-Channel SSDs". That LightNVM code is now slated for removal with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" has been officially released now after just over two years in development...

Besides the very successful Godot game engine and the up and coming O3DE, Ogre continues progressing as another useful open-source game engine. Out this weekend is Ogre 13.0 as the project switches up its versioning scheme...

A new status report has been published by the developers of "Asahi Linux" that are continuing to work on providing Linux support for the Apple Silicon initially with the M1 SoC...

One of the features that has come together nicely for Linux on laptops in recent months has been the platform profile support around the ACPI specification with support from multiple laptop vendors for allowing users to control their power/performance preference based on various system profile configurations. A patch is pending for newer ASUS laptops to enjoy this platform profile control under Linux...

In addition to Debian GNU/Linux 11 set for release today, Debian GNU/Hurd 2021 has been released as the unofficial port of Debian to the GNU Hurd micro-kernel...

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is due for release today and the Debian developers involved are indeed putting the final touches on this next major Debian GNU/Linux distribution release...

KDE developers had another busy summertime week with a variety of UI improvements and other polishing to this open-source desktop environment...

Ardour as one of the leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solutions is out with another new release...

Given this week's launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT and that also bringing the new Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver, I was curious to see how the Vulkan ray-tracing performance compares now against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series on Linux.