Phoronix

It's crazy to think that in a few days it will already be six years since the debut of Vulkan 1.0, but here we are. The Khronos Group is continuing on their two year major update regiment for Vulkan and today debuting Vulkan 1.3 with more extensions moved to core as well as introducing a new "profiles" concept.

For the just-announced Vulkan 1.3, the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers within Mesa are prepared to land support for this updated specification...

According to a report this morning from Bloomberg, NVIDIA is communicating to their partners that they face the real possibility their deal to acquire Arm will not come to pass...

Now that Linux 5.17 has prepared DRM privacy screen support, the GNOME 42 is ready with its user-space side support for making use of this new standardized interface...

NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches...

Ahead of the Linux-based Steam Deck hopefully shipping around the end of February, Valve announced a new Steamworks feature called Dynamic Cloud Sync...

While just one part of the overall equation for a system with open-source firmware, the Framework Laptop has joined the ranks of the Linux-focused laptops these days being backed by open-source firmware for its embedded controller (EC)...

Git 2.35 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system...

After being an Epic Games exclusive for its first year, HITMAN III launched on Steam last week. While there isn't a native Linux port for HITMAN 3, it does run wonderful under Steam Play with Proton for enjoying this Windows game on Linux complete with Vulkan API rendering. Here are some initial benchmarks of HITMAN 3 on Linux with NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards.

The first alpha release of the huge Godot 4.0 is now available! Godot 4.0 has been shaping up to be a massive update for this open-source game engine...

DXVK 1.9.4 is now available for this Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other software...

Thanks to hiring more Linux developers and preparing to ramp up for next-generation hardware support, the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is going to be another exciting step forward for AMD Linux customers...

Among the many new features in Linux 5.17 are several notable network optimizations. Optimizing network performance is a never-ending game and already for a future kernel are a new set of UDP/IPv6 optimizations being worked on...

It's just with the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel that the "asus_wmi_ec_sensors" is making its debut for greatly expanded sensor support for modern ASUS desktop motherboards. However, there is already a new driver that has been in development that ultimately aims to be superior to this still-new driver...

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux could soon be making it easier to transition older, end-of-life devices off official firmware packages and onto the likes of open-source Coreboot for capable aging PC hardware. This not only would make the system run on more free software but would extend the life of the hardware with firmware updates where the vendor has ceased their support...

Following GCC, the LLVM Clang C/C++ compiler front-end is now defaulting to using the DWARFv5 debugging data format...

This morning marked the release of Linux 5.17-rc1 that officially ends the merge window for this next stable kernel series. Linux 5.17 won't see its stable debut until around the end of March but there is a lot to get excited about for this open-source kernel in 2022.

For those interested in compilers, Mold as the "Modern Linker" is one of the interesting projects to watch in 2022...

Due to family travels Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.17-rc1 a little bit early that marks the end of the Linux 5.17 merge window...

Cloud-Hypervisor 21.0 was released this past week as its first feature release since this open-source Intel project moved to the Linux Foundation with backing from Microsoft and Arm. Cloud-Hypervisor 21.0 brings new features and fixes to this Rust-written hypervisor...

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media have released SVT-AV1 0.9 with nearly one year worth of changes to this high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoder. SVT-AV1 0.9 is now even faster as shown by our latest benchmarks.

If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you...

It was a very busy and productive week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing...

In addition to Linux 5.17 bringing support for the low-cost StarFive RISC-V platform among other RISC-V updates, more changes for this royalty-free processor ISA were sent in on Friday...

It's been nearly one year since NVIDIA's last update to Quake II RTX as their port of Quake II to using Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for RTX path-traced global illumination. Fortunately, that changed today as they are out with a big update in the form of Quake II RTX v1.6...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window is closing this weekend with the debut of 5.17-rc1, managing to come in at the last minute are a few more additions for Intel's next-generation Raptor Lake processors...

Landing today for Mesa 22.0 was a fix for Vulkan ray-tracing with the RADV driver in the RDNA Wave32 shader mode and then switching to Wave32 by default for ray-tracing on RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs...

Earlier this week the Linux Vendor Firmware Service began surging with activity following many new system firmware files being uploaded for what appears to be a "high severity upcoming security issue" but currently undisclosed. That issue hasn't been made public yet, but after poking around it is updating the Intel CPU microcode.

After recently carrying out the Core i5 12400 Linux benchmarks against other modern processors, for curiosity I ran some benchmarks on some older hardware going back to AMD Kaveri and Intel Sandy Bridge for a look at how the modern Ubuntu performance compares across all those systems...

For the past several years the X.Org Foundation has been part of Software in the Public Interest (SPI) but are now considering other possible arrangements moving forward...

On top of all the GPU driver feature changes to merge last week, yesterday marked the first batch of "fixes" sent in to Linux 5.17 for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Notable from this batch of fixes is getting GPU recovery enabled for Yellow Carp / Rembrandt APUs...

The RTC subsystem changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel ahead of its merge window winding down this weekend...

To date the Intel Linux graphics driver has supported Intel's DG2 "Alchemist" G10 and G11 sub-platforms/variants as the main designs to this point. However, at the end of last year we began seeing "G12" references surface in their compute stack and now the Intel open-source Linux kernel driver is formally preparing the DG2-G12 variant support...

In addition to the Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda installer working on a web-based implementation, openSUSE/SUSE is also exploring a web-based installation front-end built atop their existing YaST. They are developing this new web front-end as the "D-Installer" project...

Red Hat with the Fedora community have been working for years now to make Cockpit very capable for a web-based interface for administering Linux servers. In addition to this year working on shifting their Anaconda installer to a web-based interface that makes use of Cockpit, from this web management portal they are wanting to make it easier to setup file sharing with NFS and Samba...

When it comes to OpenGL extension support, the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation now has as robust coverage as core Mesa offers and what is implemented by the LLVMpipe software driver, RadeonSI Gallium3D, and the Intel i965 drivers...

A handful of new AMD Radeon open-source GPU sofware releases were made today for developers...

The long time Phoronix reader, with an excellent long-term memory, may remember an odd article from back in August 2017 on buying a passively cooled computer. It tells the tale of the consumer who decided to buy a rather niche, fanless, therefore passively cooled computer.

Over the years the Linux kernel has picked up many different sanitizers, memory leak detectors, and other features for helping to diagnose and address deficiencies in the kernel. However, all of these debugging-optimized features aren't centrally located that can make it difficult for system administrators and developers to spot these numerous features when configuring a kernel build manually. Now with Linux 5.17 that is changing...

Last week I noted about EDAC changes in Linux 5.17 for future AMD CPUs. The "Error Detection and Correction" work included AMD adding RDDR5 / LRDDR5 support to their driver and new CPU model IDs that appear to be for Zen 4. Also working on next-gen AMD processor support in Linux 5.17 are recent SMCA changes...

I've been writing about Genode OS for over a decade as one of the interesting original, open-source operating system frameworks that has taken novel approaches to many design elements and continues persevering with their efforts. For 2022 the project has yet more ambitious goals ahead...

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System may not see too much use out of desktop Linux distributions at least as it concerns any easy/semi-endorsed root install option, but this file-system does continue maturing and seeing much use by enthusiasts and especially among the plethora of Android devices now supporting this flash-optimized file-system. With Linux 5.17, F2FS has some performance improvements and other fixes...

SUSE today formally announced SUSE Liberty Linux as its support offering for mixed Linux environments within enterprises...

The race is on for delivering XWayland 22.1 in time for the spring Linux distribution releases with at least Fedora Workstation 36 expected to carry this updated package for allowing X11 clients to work atop Wayland compositors...

A QtWayland module change has landed that should greatly improve the NVIDIA Wayland experience when running the KDE desktop on modern NVIDIA drivers offering GBM API support...

In recent years The Khronos Group has been expanding a lot and forming a number of new open industry standards around 3D commerce, analytics rendering, and more. The latest is Khronos now establishing a Camera API working group...

Last May there was some work on compiling LibreOffice to WebAssembly as another means of getting this open-source office suite executing within the web browser and other environments. It had been quiet since on the LibreOffice WASM front but a number of new commits were merged this morning...

KDE developer Nate Graham has sorted through plans for the 15-minute bug initiative for focusing on correcting many low-hanging bugs affecting the KDE desktop that should be able to be quickly discovered by users...

After ending out 2021 with an AMDVLK update to fix poor performance on Wayland, AMD today issued AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 with their first set of changes for the new year...

The RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been successfully submitted...