Phoronix

While we are very eager for Godot 4.0 with everything that this open-source game engine is going to deliver on, Godot 3.5 beta is out today and is a rather nice interim step forward...

KDE has made available the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.24 desktop update ahead of its planned stable release on 8 February...

Samsung in partnership with Tesla has posted a set of 23 patches for enabling Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) SoC for the mainline Linux kernel...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have now committed the DG2/Alchemist graphics card PCI IDs and device information data to Mesa 22.0 for their OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, but for now until the Linux kernel support is baked this is disabled...

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced the DXGKRNL driver as the kernel driver component for supporting GPU accelerated use-cases within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). That original DXGKRNL driver was quickly shot down by upstream kernel developers and various issues raised while now for the past year Microsoft has been reworking this kernel driver and on Wednesday published the new version...

Being worked on since early 2020 by Red Hat's David Howells has been a rewrite to Linux's FS-Cache and CacheFiles code focusing on making it smaller and simpler while also presenting possible memory/performance advantages. That major rewrite has been merged now for Linux 5.17...

Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks...

The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation "SLS" mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow...

Formally announced at CES, the Core i5 12400 and other Alder Lake non-K desktop CPUs are beginning to appear in retail channels. Last week I was able to buy an Intel Core i5 12400 "Alder Lake" from a major Internet retailer for $209 USD -- and one week later there remains availability during these turbulent supply chain times. The i5-12400 has wound up being a very nice processor for Linux use that exceeded my initial expectations.

It's not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17.....

In addition to the prompt support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, another exciting milestone for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing mainline support for the StarFive JH7100, which has been trying to make its debut as the first usable and low-cost RISC-V platform...

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler...

Qualcomm only announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and X65 platforms at the end of November but already they have managed to provide timely mainline support for these latest high-end SoCs. This is great to see compared to the days of slow to materialize mainline support for new Arm SoCs, which still persists among some vendors with either belated mainline support or only focusing on vendor downstream kernels. The big batch of Arm SoC/platform changes have landed for Linux 5.17...

A patch merged into Mesa 22.0 on Tuesday for Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is helping bump up the perforrmance in modern games...

Over the past two years work has been ramping up a lot on Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel and with the in-development Linux 5.17 there is more feature code landing...

The GNOME Shell and Mutter have checked in their new development releases for the imminent GNOME 42 Alpha milestone...

In addition to the Btrfs updates, the EXT4 and XFS file-system maintainers submitted their feature changes already for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel...

Merged into LLVM's mono repository minutes ago was BOLT! This is the Facebook-developed tool for optimizing the layout of binaries in the name of delivering greater performance. Facebook (now Meta) already has been using BOLT internally to great success with production workloads, it's continued advancing in the public as open-source for a while, and is now upstream in LLVM for fostering its future development...

The Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda installer for carrying out new operating system installs is in the early stages of a major rewrite to its user-interface and moving forward will be web-based...

While PCIe 5.0 adoption is only in its infancy, the PCI-SIG today announced the PCIe 6.0 specification...

In addition to announcing the GeForce RTX 3080 12GB graphics card this morning, NVIDIA has published their first public beta of the new NVIDIA 510 Linux driver series...

While RADV is not AMD's official Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems, for Mesa 22.0 they have contributed a set of optimizations to improve the "DRI_PRIME" performance for hybrid GPU setups such as the growing number of AMD powered notebooks with discrete graphics...

DXVK 1.9.3 is out as its first release of 2022 for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for allowing Windows games to enjoy good performance when running atop Linux via Valve's Steam Play...

Intel's pixel pipeline optimization work focused on speeding up DG2/Alchemist graphics cards with their open-source graphics driver has managed to land in Mesa 22.0...

The power management subsystem updates were sent out yesterday and already mainlined for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel. Most notable with the power management changes for this new version of the Linux kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver developed in cooperation with Valve for the Steam Deck but stands to help CPU/SoC power efficiency across Zen 2 and newer hardware...

Following Microsoft working on shader storage buffer object support for their Gallium3D D3D12 back-end within Mesa, they've been working on OpenGL compute and OpenGL ES 3.1 support for this controversial component to allow OpenGL/GLES/OpenCL to work atop Windows' Direct3D 12 drivers such as for Windows Subsystem for Linux...

The Linux 5.17 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates include the new NZXT driver, new drivers to greatly expand sensor coverage on modern ASUS desktop motherboards, temperature monitoring for next-gen AMD Zen processors, and more...

Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser...

With the Btrfs file-system popularity ticking back up, that seems to be helping upstream enthusiasm and development efforts as with Linux 5.17 there is yet more exciting work...

Intel announced new leadership changes today as 2022 gets started for what is expected to be an eventful year at the company with Sapphire Rapids, Raptor Lake, and Intel Arc graphics ahead...

While many were upset by CentOS Linux 8 going premature EOL at the end of last year, for those that made the move to CentOS Stream there continues to be a love of moment in part by the recently establisher Hyperscale SIG. For CentOS Stream 9, the big hyperscalers have been working on some interesting additions/backporting to the platform...

DragonFlyBSD 6.2 is now available as the latest version of this popular BSD open-source operating system...

Following last week's release of Chrome 97, Google has promoted Chrome 98 to beta form...

The x86 platform drivers area of the kernel remains very active in recent times thanks to the continued investments by Red Hat as well as growing IHV interest from the likes of Lenovo while also still having many contributions flow in from the likes of AMD and Intel. With Linux 5.17 are a number of driver additions and improvements for benefiting various x86 laptops and tablets...

The Linux networking subsystem updates for the in-development 5.17 kernel are quite exciting as usual given how prolific Linux is from large servers in the cloud to running on enterprise networking gear down to Linux on small IoT hardware. Not only is there a lot of hardware driver action as usual but also some key performance/latency optimizations...

The HID subsystem changes are rather exciting this time around of the new feature material for Linux 5.17...

With the Linux 5.17 kernel merge window formally open today, among the early pull requests sent out this morning were the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates which is notable this time in preparation for next-generation AMD EPYC server hardware...

It's been almost one year already since the last XWayland standalone feature release separate from the X.Org Server codebase itself while now the next feature installment will soon be out...

Following yesterday's release of Linux 5.16, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.16-gnu as their downstream that removes/disables any code depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode binaries, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and other cleaning in the name of free software...

As expected the Linux 5.16 kernel has been promoted to stable...

Back on Christmas Eve I noted how the Linux 5.16 performance was looking real good for AMD APUs as a performance improvement not widely noted to that point with significant uplift over Linux 5.15 stable. The good news is Linux 5.16 is set to debut as stable today and the benchmark results with AMD APU graphics is looking very promising after carrying out tests on additional available systems.

Going back a number of months Google engineers have been working to address the issue of the Linux kernel's page reclaim code being too expensive for which they devised the multi-generational LRU framework "MGLRU" and it continues being worked on with mainline ambitions...

Sway 1.7 is up to its second release candidate for this popular i3-inspired Wayland lightweight compositor...

Among many other sound driver changes destined for the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle, Cirrus Logic has contributed CS35L41 HD audio codec support in the form of a new sound driver, cs35l41_hda...

While our testing has consistently shown how Clear Linux can deliver leading performance on Intel/AMD x86_64 platforms, one of the user criticisms to that distribution has been around the limited selection of packaged software especially on the desktop side. But the rather interesting Distrobox can help address that by leveraging Podman or Docker to run other Linux distribution user-space software packages atop...

What may end up being one of the greatest Linux kernel features of 2022 is the recently published "Fast Kernel Headers" effort for cleaning up the kernel headers and dramatically speeding up Linux kernel builds both for absolute/clean and incremental builds. Fast Kernel Headers can cut the Linux kernel build time in half or greater and out this weekend are the v2 patches...

The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17...

It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have kicked off 2022 into full-swing with new features and other improvements now on their way to the next round of KDE software releases...