Feed phoronix Phoronix

Favorite IconPhoronix

Link https://www.phoronix.com/
Feed http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php
Updated 2025-09-14 00:00
OpenZFS 2.0.1 Released With Linux 5.10 Support, Many Fixes
Released at the end of November was the much anticipated OpenZFS 2.0 open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. Today that has been succeeded by OpenZFS 2.0.1 with support for newer Linux kernels and many bug fixes...
Fedora 34 Looks To Sign Individual Files Within RPMs
Yet another big change being eyed for Fedora 34 is to sign individual files within shipped RPM packages. The signatures will use the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and in turn can be used to enforce run-time policies around only allowing the execution of trusted files...
Raspberry Pi "VC4" DRM Driver Sees 10/12 BPC Color Depth With Linux 5.12
With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver...
Google Continues Work On Linux "Restricted DMA" For Situations Like Remote WiFi Attacks
Google engineers continue working on the Linux kernel around "Restricted DMA" for helping to protect systems that lack DMA access control for hardware without an IOMMU...
HDMI Forum Closing Public Specification Access Is Hurting Open-Source GPU Drivers
It's been recently elaborated why the likes of FreeSync support over HDMI aren't coming to the open-source drivers, at least not yet... It stems from the decision by the HDMI Forum to prevent public access to the HDMI specification, which in turn is hurting open-source graphics drivers...
LLVM 11.0.1 Tagged As The Latest Stable Bits For This Open-Source Compiler
While LLVM 12.0 should be out around March as the next half-year feature update to this innovative and widely-used open-source compiler stack, LLVM 11.0.1 is now being christened as the only planned stable point release to LLVM 11...
Panfrost Gallium3D Flips On AFBC For Bifrost GPUs
Adding to the long list of changes for Mesa 21.0 is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali graphics hardware now supporting Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) for Bifrost GPUs...
Benchmarking OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 With Its AMD Zen Optimized Build
While Intel has Clear Linux as an aggressively optimized Linux distribution catering towards their hardware, there isn't a direct equivalent for optimally showcasing the performance potential of current AMD platforms. Clear Linux often offers leading performance on Zen CPUs but that is obviously not by design but just an artifact of a lot in common between the latest Intel and AMD microarchitecture features. One of the few distributions (or only notable one) offering specific AMD Zen optimized builds has been OpenMandriva. With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release candidate shipping this week, I ran some fresh benchmarks looking at how OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC1 compares between its generic x86_64 image and that of the Zen optimized build as well as in turn how that performance compares to Clear Linux and Ubuntu 20.10.
Wasmer 1.0 Released As The Universal WebAssembly Runtime Outside The Browser
As we have been expecting in recent weeks, Wasmer 1.0 has been released as the "universal WebAssembly runtime" for helping to accelerate WASM adoption and new use-cases outside of the web browser...
Fedora 34 To Ship With Standalone XWayland, LLVM 12 + Other Changes Approved
Fedora 34 remains under active feature development and another batch of features were unanimously approved of by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...
Zink With Mesa 21.0 Now Exposes OpenGL 4.1
While for months there have been experimental patches taking Zink to OpenGL 4.6 for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer integrated into Mesa, the upstreaming process around testing and code review is quite lengthy with up until today still only exposing OpenGL 3.3 with mainline Mesa. But with the latest Git commits, Zink is now up to OpenGL 4.1...
Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Released For Open-Source, Cross-Platform Automated Benchmarking
Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 is available today as the latest quarterly (Q1-2021) feature update to our open-source automated benchmarking framework for Linux, macOS, Solaris, Windows, and BSD platforms.
RHEL9 Raises Base Target For x86_64 CPUs Plus Possible Optimized Libraries With glibc-hwcaps
As we reported almost one year ago, Red Hat was looking at likely dropping older x86_64 CPU support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and we now have a better idea of their plans in catering RHEL9 better to modern processors...
Radeon Linux Drivers Now Only Officially Support Smart Access Memory On Zen 3 + RDNA2
While many Linux users were excited when finding out the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers were allowing Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support on older motherboards/CPUs and older Radeon GPUs rather than basically the very latest AMD products as seen on Windows, there is a change of course due to bugs. Now, officially, Mesa 21.0 is just enabling Smart Access Memory for systems with AMD Zen 3 processors and RDNA 2 graphics cards though if you have other hardware you can force-enable it...
Lutris 0.5.8.2 Linux Game Manager Brings Wayland Improvements, Other Additions
Lutris as the open-source Linux game manager that makes it easy to install Wine game as well as various emulator games, Steam titles, and more, is out with an interesting update to kick off the new year...
PicoXcell Support Finally Slated For Removal From The Linux Kernel
PicoXcell, the ARM SoCs from PicoChip more than a decade ago before being bought out by MindSpeed and then Intel, are set to finally see their Linux support removed this year...
Fedora 34 Planning To Offer LXQt 0.16 Desktop Packages
Keeping up with Fedora's tradition of offering the very latest open-source software packages, the straight-forward proposal was made this week to update its lightweight LXQt desktop packages against the new LXQt 0.16...
Intel Submits Initial Batch Of Graphics Driver Updates Slated For Linux 5.12
Now that more developers are returning from their holiday breaks, the first pull request to DRM-Next has been submitted of Intel kernel graphics driver material destined for Linux 5.12...
Radeon FreeSync Video Mode Optimization Updated For The AMDGPU Linux Driver
Last month we wrote about AMD engineers working on an experimental video mode optimization for FreeSync with the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. With AMD staff getting back to work following the holidays, an updated patch set was submitted today...
The Qt Company Is Tomorrow Moving Qt 5.15 To Its Commercial-Only LTS Phase
As part of their fundamental shift to restrict Qt LTS point releases to commercial customers, The Qt Company is closing the Qt 5.15 branch to the public tomorrow with future Qt 5.15 LTS point releases to be restricted to paying licensees...
AMD Performance On Linux 5.11 Remains Mixed Due To Schedutil With Frequency Invariance
Back on Christmas I wrote about Linux 5.11 regressing for AMD performance on Zen 2 and newer systems where the just-added CPU frequency invariance support was often hurting various workloads when using the default "Schedutil" scheduler utilization frequency scaling governor. Since then and through the holidays I have been carrying out many more benchmarks looking at the Linux 5.11 performance with a particular focus on the AMD desktop/server platforms.
Intel Keem Bay Accelerated Hashing Driver Positioned For Linux 5.12
Keem Bay, Intel's third-generation Movidius VPU (Vision Processing Unit), continues seeing more upstream open-source hardware support within the Linux kernel. Coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel in a couple months will be more support within the crypto subsystem...
RADV Vulkan Driver Begins Landing Optimizations For AMD Smart Access Memory
Following RadeonSI seeing optimizations around AMD Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support last month, the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" within Mesa 21.0 is also seeing similar treatment...
Linux NVMe Simple-Copy Support Inches Closer To The Kernel
Another one of the features you won't find in the Linux 5.11 kernel is support for the recently ratified NVMe Simple Copy but work on supporting that feature continues...
Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Finally Exploiting Intel/AMD FMA For More Performance
The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance...
Linux 5.11-rc2 Released - It's Tiny Due To Developers Offline With "Holiday Things"
The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...
Linus Torvalds On The Importance Of ECC RAM, Calls Out Intel's "Bad Policies" Over ECC
There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread...
dav1d 0.8 Released With More Optimizations - More AMD Performance
Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking...
New + Updated Benchmarks For December 2020
In ending out a strong year for OpenBenchmarking.org growth in 2020, there were also many test profile updates and some new test profiles (benchmarks) that were made available in December for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org users...
LLVM Adds Initial Support For PowerPC LE
LLVM has added support for PowerPC LE (32-bit) as its newest target...
Valve Revises Steam's December 2020 Linux Marketshare To 0.74%
The numbers Steam posted on New Year's Day for the December 2020 Linux gaming marketshare showed a drop of 0.33% down to just 0.57%. That is a rather large drop but now Valve has updated their numbers and point to Linux still regressing percentage wise but not as bad as originally reported...
Wine-Staging 6.0-RC5 Is Testing A Patch That May Hurt The Performance Of Some Games
Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features...
Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Linux 5.10 Ahead Of Shipping That LTS Kernel Update
Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer...
DTPM "Avoid Burning Yourself" Framework Diverted From Linux 5.11
Yesterday I wrote about the DTPM framework being sent in for Linux 5.11 but ultimately Linus Torvalds has decided not to accept it out of the merge window...
Wine 6.0-RC5 Released With 21 Bug Fixes
Wine 6.0 stable should be out this month but for now is another weekly release candidate of this open-source project that allows running Windows games/applications on Linux, macOS, and BSD platforms...
Linux No-Copy Bvec Patches Revved For The New Year As Another I/O Optimization
The Linux kernel has been seeing incredible innovations and optimizations in the I/O area in recent times from IO_uring to numerous performance enhancements. One of the recent performance enhancements seeing activity and promising results is the no-copy bvec behavior...
Mesa's Clover OpenCL Adds Support For Loading SPIR-V IL Programs
The latest OpenCL "Clover" work to land in Mesa 21.0 is support for the cl_khr_il_program extension...
11 Features That Didn't Make It In 2020 For Linux 5.11
For as great as Linux 5.11 is with its new features, there is also some prominent material that has yet to be upstreamed into the mainline kernel -- some of which is likely to hit in 2021 while other changes have less likely ambitions for mainline...
ReactOS Has Been Steadily Improving As An Open-Source Windows Implementation
ReactOS as the long work-in-progress open-source operating system implementation of Windows enjoyed much progress over the course of 2020...
Even With The New Year's Holidays, KDE Still Saw Some Improvements This Week
While development on KDE (and other open-source projects too) was lighter this week as a result of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the KDE desktop still saw some refinements this week...
Valve's Steam Data For December Points To A Huge Dip For Linux Gaming Marketshare
Valve just published their Steam Survey numbers for December 2020 and it's a huge letdown for Linux gamers if the numbers are indeed accurate...
Linux 5.11 Gets New Framework To Help Avoid Burning Your Skin On Hot Devices
While the Linux 5.11 merge window has been over for one week where new features are normally added, a power management pull request sent in today for mainline is adding some tardy features including the Dynamic Thermal Power Management (DTPM) framework that in part is designed to help ensure users don't burn themselves with hot devices...
OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC Released With Linux 5.10, Completed AArch64 Port
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 was released last February while now we are closing in on the release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 for that Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution...
The Linux Kernel Made Terrific Strides In 2020
The Linux kernel in 2020 saw lots of new features added and other functionality improved while continuing to generally keep pace with punctual new hardware support...
KDE In 2021 Should See Production-Ready Plasma Wayland, Other Improvements
KDE developer Nate Graham who has made a lot of contributions to KDE in recent years and is well known for his weekly KDE development summaries has published a 2021 roadmap for the year...
Some Linux/Open-Source Letdowns Last For Years
New Year's Eve two years ago I wrote about the open-source / Linux letdowns of 2018. It was well received at the time and sparked some interesting discussions so as we celebrate the start of 2021 I figured it would be interesting to look back and see which of those letdowns were since resolved and what ones are remaining...
Mesa Enjoyed A Record-Setting Year With Intel G3D Default, RADV ACO, Faster Performance
2020 was easily the best year yet for Mesa with this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers seeing timely new hardware support, Intel's OpenGL support defaulting to Iris Gallium3D, the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver adding and defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end, many performance optimizations throughout, timely new GPU hardware support, and a lot more!..
Panfrost Gallium3D Seeing Some Work Towards Clover OpenCL Support
The Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver matured into good shape over the course of 2020 with providing OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware. As we enter 2021 it will be interesting to see this year if any "Panfrost Vulkan" driver materializes for open-source Vulkan support on the newer Mali graphics hardware. But at least one area making interesting process is in regards to OpenCL compute support...
Happy New Year! A Look Back At The Most Popular Phoronix Content Of 2020
After 219 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles and 3,206 original news articles on Phoronix for 2020, it's finally time to put a wrap on this year... Happy New Year and 2021 couldn't have come soon enough!..
Linux 5.12 Should See ACPI Platform Profile Support To Alter System Thermal/Power Levels
Thanks to the ongoing upstream improvements being pursued by Lenovo as part of their effort to enhance their product support, the Linux power management tree has picked up the initial ACPI Platform Profile implementation for benefiting newer devices like Lenovo laptops...
...288289290291292293294295296297...