Phoronix

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...

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...

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...

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...

Merged yesterday into the LibreOffice code-base was introducing yet another graphics drawing back-end for this open-source office suite...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

As one of the last major feature changes heading into Mesa Git this calendar year, RadeonSI Gallium3D as the open-source OpenGL driver for modern AMD Radeon GPUs there is now sparse texture support...

It was another exciting year for Intel on the open-source/Linux front with countless contributions to the Linux kernel, Mesa, and other open-source projects. Intel's oneAPI toolkits continue humming along and they continue maintaining tons of other projects from Clear Linux to SVT-AV1 to IWD and many more. Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have also been extremely busy preparing the open-source support for next year's discrete GPU launches. Here is a look at the most popular Intel articles on Phoronix during the course of 2021...

OpenRGB 0.7 is out as the newest feature release for this vendor-independent software that provides for RGB lighting controls for many different devices/brands and works across Linux / macOS / Windows...

In preparing for an exciting 2022, the OBS Studio open-source software that is popular with game streamers and for other screencasting purposes, is out with its first beta of OBS Studio 27.2. This next update to OBS Studio is bringing some exciting improvements for this leading cross-platform streaming solution...

For those sticking to stable Mesa point releases, Mesa 21.3.3 is out today to close out the year. Notable with Mesa 21.3.3 is the large number of fixes for older ATI Radeon R300 through R500 (X1000 series) GPU fixes with the R300 Gallium3D driver...

A small but noteworthy change that landed today for the GCC 12 compiler itself is support for using the Mold linker...

Fedora is often on the bleeding-edge of changes for tier-one Linux distributions but not all of them are very technical in nature but sometimes just cosmetic alterations. Among the latest batch of change proposals for next spring's Fedora 36 is to change the default font...

Earlier this month AMD released AOCC 3.2 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler focused on delivering optimized Zen performance. With our initial AMD AOCC 3.2 benchmarks on Zen 3, there is nice incremental improvement compared to the prior 3.x releases. But how does this AMD-optimized compiler stack up against the upstream LLVM Clang and GCC compilers? Here is a look at the AMD AOCC performance against the current Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers.

For those with systems making use of an Intel "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controller, a Linux kernel driver improvement working its way to mainline should yield thermal/power benefits...

Last year there was some work for getting Gallium3D Zink working on macOS for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to in turn run it atop the MoltenVK library for translating the Vulkan calls to Apple's Metal graphics/compute API. That work fell into disrepair but now the fixed up code for allowing Zink to build on Apple's operating system has been merged into Mesa 22.0...

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the year with the many milestones they achieved in ramping up their support both for desktop/mobile and server hardware and continued successes when it comes to their open-source Radeon graphics driver stack...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver providing the open-source kernel display/graphics support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has ready its batch of changes for DRM-Next to appear in Linux 5.17...

Intel open-source engineers have prepared "PFRUT" support for Platform Firmware Runtime Updates for allowing (U)EFI capsule updates to be performed on capable systems without rebooting the system in order to eliminate downtime...

Queued into the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle are some Alder Lake audio updates...

As we hit the end of 2021 for those wondering about the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland gaming performance difference for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver stack and desktops on Ubuntu 21.10.

Microsoft continues improving the Gallium3D Direct3D 12 path within Mesa for getting more of OpenGL running atop it on Windows...

The BSDs continue to lag behind Linux when it comes to the graphics driver support, but this time the Intel Whiskey Lake graphics should have been in long ago -- and believed to be -- but adding the PCI IDs were forgotten...

While not nearly as featureful as say OpenShot or Kdenlive, Avidemux is an open-source video editor that is simple to use and has been around for a long time. Avidemux 2.8 is now available as the latest feature release...

AMD Smart Trace Buffer "STB" support is ready for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel cycle...

Last week I posted some benchmarks looking at the laptop battery life implications of GNOME's Wayland vs. X.Org sessions. From that testing with a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U laptop, the GNOME Wayland session led to around 3 Watt lower power consumption than with the same software stack while logging into the X.Org-based session. For those curious about the KDE Wayland vs. X.Org power impact, here is the same set of tests carried out in the KDE space...

LibreOffice 7.3 is due out in early February while for ensuring it will be another successful feature release to this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 7.3 RC1 was made available today for some nice holiday testing...

Intel's modern WiFi driver "IWLWIFI" is set to see a number of improvements with the Linux 5.17 kernel development cycle kicking off in January...

Carsten Haitzler released a new version of the Enlightenment window manager / shell (and Wayland compositor) for Christmas. Various Enlightenment components have also seen new releases...

It was nearly four years ago already that Intel announced Sound Open Firmware in pushing for open-source sound firmware for their hardware. The Sound Open Firmware effort has been a great success even if it's not a shiny project widely talked about among consumers. Just prior to the holidays Sound Open Firmware 2.0 was quietly released...

When it comes to the Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtual machine targets, the most powerful option under Linux right now is the Quadra 800. That though for virtualization purposes isn't too useful by today's standards with being limited to 1GB of RAM and limited interface support. But a new Virtual M68k Machine aims to provide a more useful target and support has already landed in QEMU while the Linux kernel support is pending...

The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.16-rc7 today as the newest weekly test candidate while the official Linux 5.16 stable release should happen in two weeks...

Another important step toward Apple M1 hardware being useful under Linux is in the process of being realized... Working WiFi. The initial "request for comments" patch series was sent out today enabling the Broadcom "BRCMFMAC" driver to work for the wireless LAN support on the M1 SoC as well as with the Apple T2 platforms...

While off the usual Friday release regiment due to the Christmas holidays, Wine 7.0-rc3 was released minutes ago as the newest test release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux...

As we approach the end of the year, here is a look back at some of the Mesa open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan driver development statistics for 2021 compared to prior years as well as a look at the top contributors to this crucial piece of the Linux desktop stack...

It's been nearly two years in the making since Intel posted FGKASLR patches for improving Linux kernel security. While that work on Finer Grained / Function Granular KASLR stalled for a year, in recent months work on it was revived and in 2022 looks like this security is on a path for mainlining...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.8 is out as the latest quarterly feature update to our open-source, automated and cross-platform benchmarking software...

Lumina is the desktop project originally started by PC-BSD/TrueOS developers as a BSD-focused desktop environment built atop Qt. When TrueOS stopped focusing on being a great desktop BSD, Lumina development stalled. But for Linux and BSD users fond of this lightweight Qt desktop, Lumina Desktop development restarted a few months ago...

Another open-source project releasing on Christmas is LuxCoreRender 2.6 as a sizable feature update incorporating the better part of a year's worth of improvements to this physically based rendering software...

The latest KDE weekly development summary is out that notes all of the fixes and improvements made during Christmas week...

Ruby 3.1 is out this Christmas day as a big feature release for this programming language while retaining compatibility with Ruby 3.0...

KiCad 6.0 has been tagged as a major update to this leading open-source printed circuit board design program...

It's been a while since last having anything major to report on the Etnaviv Linux driver stack reporting open-source support Vivante graphics IP. With Linux 5.17 is an important step forward with the driver now behaving properly for IOMMU-enabled systems...

AMD on Christmas Eve posted their seventh iteration of the AMD P-State Linux driver as their new CPU frequency scaling solution for Zen 2+ to make use of ACPI CPPC for ultimately striving toward optimal power efficiency with a focus on mobile and desktop systems...