Phoronix

The first week of August saw many fixes land in the KDE camp as they prepare for their software to be used on more third-party products, with Steam Deck being just the latest notable product leveraging KDE...

Last week's AMDGPU pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.15 added support for the "Cyan Skillfish" APU and other early work while an additional pull request was submitted on Friday...

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine...

In recent months there has been an effort to update GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to reflect the GTK4 toolkit and recommendations around new widgets, utility panes, and more for enhancing the accessibility of GNOME applications, arguably looking better, and just otherwise modernizing aspects of the HIG that haven't been touched in months. That updated GNOME HIG is now official...

AMD has published their newest open-source Vulkan driver snapshot from their official sources that comprise this "AMDVLK" offering for Linux users...

After the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced last week and ahead of the retail availability next week, today AMD's "unboxing embargo" has expired for this new RDNA2 graphics card focused on delivering high 1080p frame rates. The card we have been testing out under Linux is the ASRock Phantom Gaming RX 6600 XT.

Mozilla is trying once again to enable AVIF image decoding support by default within the Firefox web browser. AVIF is the promising image file format based on using AV1 in the HEIF file format...

Amazon's Data Access Monitor "DAMON" code is now set for introduction in Linux 5.15...

Intel security researchers have been working on implementing toolchain-optimized fine-grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support on top of Intel's hardware-based Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). By leveraging Intel CET, the Control-Flow Integrity overhead is much lower than the otherwise pure software/compiler-based approach. This Linux security improvement is being worked on under the name of FineIBT...

Flax Engine 1.2.6222 is out today as the first v1.2 update for this cross-platform, open-source but commercial game engine...

The ongoing FUTEX2 work for making the futex handling more like Windows to in turn help Windows games on Linux via Wine (with a focus on Steam Play's Proton) has taken a new turn...

This summer we have been testing the Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE as one of the company's newest options for those in the market for an AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" 1U 1P barebones server. Across our wide range of Linux and BSD benchmarking this Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE with Tyan S8036GM2NE motherboard has been holding up well and meeting our requirements and proven reliability in having tested Tyan products now at Phoronix for over the past 16 years.

While Samba is well known for SMB/CIFS server support on Linux and other platforms for supporting Microsoft's SMB networking protocol for file and print services, Samba is implemented in user-space while Samsung has been pursuing an SMB server implemented in kernel-space for better performance and wiring up new features that can be more easily accomplished within the kernel...

Merged into the GNU Compiler Collection development code on Wednesday was an initial implementation of Assembly support for its analyzer...

Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others...

Running eBPF kernel programs continues to be increasing popular and used for a variety of use-cases in production environments but one of the challenges is around needing to compile the (e)BPF programs for a given kernel while BPF CO-RE has been working to change that. The LLVM Clang compiler already supports the ability for BPF "Compile Once, Run Everywhere" while now Oracle engineers are working to bring the same level of support to GCC...

As part of their work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for Linux, Intel engineers are proposing a driver filter option for Linux to be able to set allow or deny lists of driver(s) that can or cannot be loaded by the booted kernel...

Following last month's look at the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and some of the initial hurdles seen on Ubuntu, readers were curious about how well other Linux distributions fared compatibility wise or if offering better performance elsewhere. Here are some tests across Arch Linux, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation, and Ubuntu 21.04 for reference.

The X.Org Server has picked up a new "-fakescreenfps" option to help with VNC and other remote display scenarios...

The program/schedule for this year's XDC21 X.Org Developers' Conference was posted this week ahead of the event occurring in mid-September. There are many interesting talks about X.Org and beyond, which in recent years largely revolve around Mesa and Wayland...

One of the AMD patch series that has been in the works for more than one year is the PTDMA driver providing pass-through DMA engine support on Linux. The driver is now up to its eleventh revision but the mainlining might happen soon...

With AMD's increasing marketshare on the CPU and GPU front, scoring more data center wins, and also scoring custom design wins for Linux-based environments such as with the Tesla Model S and most recently with the Steam Deck, AMD continues hiring more Linux engineers...

AMD has released ROCm 4.3 as the newest version of their Radeon Open eCosystem stack for providing open-source GPU compute and CUDA portability for their supported graphics processors under Linux. ROCm 4.3 is the biggest update we've seen for this important enterprise piece to their enterprise GPU compute stack in a while...

Longtime kernel developer Kees Cook of the Google Security Team published a post on Google's Security Blog today effectively calling for more organizations to devote a greater number of engineers to the upstream Linux kernel in order to improve open-source security...

CodeWeavers has announced the release of CrossOver 21.0 as the latest major update to their commercial software powered by Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS...

Last year Sabrent launched the Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive and left me puzzled for months finding that the Linux performance was coming in short of expectations under Linux. However, Sabrent recently released a firmware update (v1.2) for the Rocket 4 Plus and now the drive seems to be much better positioned under Linux.

After being started by LinkedIn and open-source now for more than a half-decade while incubating at the Apache Software Foundation the past three years, Apache Pinot is the latest project graduating to become a top-level Apache project...

LLVM 13.0 feature development has ended with the code now branched and the first release candidate tagged...

X-Plane is not only the most realistic flight simulator that has long offered native Linux support but it's the only instance of a Vulkan-powered flight simulator I am aware of. While long tied to OpenGL, the company behind X-Plane is making it clear that the graphics rendering future is with Vulkan (and Metal when talking about Apple platforms)...

Monday marked the release of Git 2.33-rc0 as the first test release of the next version of this distributed revision control system...

AMD continues pushing new code out for Linux in better exposing their platform's capabilities in the open-source world. The latest AMD driver work now queued via "-next" branches for introduction this autumn in Linux 5.15 is SB-RMI sensor support...

The excellent WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel has been seeing growing adoption on Linux now that it's been in the mainline kernel for a while and also seeing continued progress on the BSDs. While there has been beta WireGuard for Windows in user-space, "WireGuardNT" was announced today as a native high-performance port to the Windows kernel...

While FWUPD 1.5.12 released last week with expanded support for Poly web cameras, FWUPD 1.6.2 is out today as the newest feature release in their latest series. FWUPD 1.6.2 brings several significant improvements for advancing open-source firmware update capabilities on Linux...

Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux...

Debian 11 "Bullseye" is set to be released mid-August while out this morning is the third release candidate of the Debian Bullseye installer. With this installer update is more documentation for users letting them know the risks of modern graphics cards and the like that are often inoperable unless loading firmware that isn't considered free software...

Red Hat's Marcelo Tosatti has submitted his latest patches implementing a basic task isolation interface for the Linux kernel that would be particularly useful for real-time workloads and high-bandwidth networking applications making use of user-space drivers...

Version 2.34 of the GNU C Library (glibc) is now available with a wide variety of changes that accumulated over the past six months...

Several X.Org/X11 components saw new releases on Sunday for kicking off August, including the xeyes program seeing its first non-point release in eleven years...

Dav1d 0.9.1 was released on Sunday as the newest feature update to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video decoder...

Linux 5.14-rc4 is available today as a rather smooth update with nothing too worrisome but just a decent amount of fixes and nothing that is causing Linux creator Linus Torvalds to be frustrated...

Not only did Valve announce Steam Deck in July but the overall Linux gaming marketshare according to the Steam Survey also hit a multi-year high...

Linux 5.15 is positioned now to see a Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) implementation with the code now queued in net-next with this being a protocol for communication between management controllers and managed devices...

ReactOS as the long-running open-source project striving for Windows ABI compatibility has been making some significant progress this summer on various endeavors...

LibreOffice 7.2 is preparing to ship this month while out today is LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 for facilitating last minute testing of this leading open-source office suite...

July was a pretty damn exciting summer month amid the pandemic thanks to many interesting Linux software and hardware announcements...

SDL 2.0.16 is being prepared for release as the successor to SDL 2.0.14. Particularly for Linux users this SDL 2.0.16 update is significant with some key enhancements for this library that is common to multi-platform games and part of the Steam runtime...

Lutris 0.5.9-beta1 is out this Sunday as a rather significant update to this open-source Linux game manager. With this new version there are many new features for this centralized game launcher...

At the end of 2019 a rework to the Linux kernel's pipe code saw some of its logic reworked to only wake up readers if needed and avoid a possible thundering herd problem. But it turns out some Android libraries abused the functionality and this has led to broken Android applications when moving to recent kernels. While the user-space software is in the wrong, the kernel is sticking to its policy of not breaking user-space and as such Linus Torvalds has changed the code's behavior for Linux 5.14 and to be back-ported to prior stable kernels...

It's looking like the new NTFS file-system kernel driver developed by Paragon Software and over the past year revised more than two dozen times could be ready for mainlining in the kernel in about one month's time when the Linux 5.15 merge window opens. Everything is finally aligning and looking like the code is in good enough shape for its initial merging though not necessarily replacing the existing NTFS driver at this point...

As a weekend blast from the past, the Linux 5.14 kernel saw some Alpha CPU architecture updates -- including various fixes and the removal of an Alpha-specific binary loader for running a decades dated x86 software emulator...