Phoronix

Vulkan 1.2.180 is out as the latest revision to this graphics/compute interface. Vulkan 1.2.180 comes with a number of fixes/clarifications to the spec plus the addition of two more extensions...

Linux's RAW driver (RAW_DRIVER) for providing direct I/O access to block devices is finally set to be removed with the Linux 5.14 kernel this summer since its deprecation all the way back in the mid 2000s and its use has been discouraged even longer...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July...

The latest updates to Valve's Proton Experimental build for Steam Play should be offering lower input latency...

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes...

The Linux x86/x86_64 kernel code already had logic in place for reserving portions of the first 1MB of RAM to avoid the BIOS or kernel potentially clobbering that space among other reasons while now Linux 5.13 is doing away with that "wankery" and will just unconditionally always reserve the first 1MB of RAM...

In addition to getting Intel's Alder Lake hybrid processors ready for the Linux kernel and other areas of the operating system stack, Intel's open-source engineers have continued their trend in recent weeks of upstreaming more Alder Lake work into Coreboot...

Robert McQueen, the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, wrote a post this week ultimately about the GNOME project's need to broaden its focus in order to attract more new users and ultimately to be able to raise funds from new organizations outside of their traditional reach. If they aren't able to find new funding sources, they may need to scale back in some of their efforts but still have a sufficient safety net...

For two years now we have seen various open-source patches around ENQCMD instructions for the code compilers and the Linux kernel. This Enqueue Stores support is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids". But even with Sapphire Rapids not launching until later this year, the already merged Linux kernel code is force-disabling the ENQCMD instructions support as the current kernel support is deemed "broken beyond repair" and will need to be reworked...

A few months ago you may recall word of Crocus as a new Mesa Gallium3D driver for supporting Intel Gen7 Haswell graphics and older back through the i965 class hardware. That Gallium3D driver for the aging class of Intel graphics is nearing mainline Mesa with the work-in-progress merge request now pending as of this week...

GNU Poke debuted earlier this year as a new GNU project providing an interactive editor and integrated, interactive programming language for dealing with binary data. Poke makes it easier to analyze binary data and their data structures as well as manipulating said binary data...

Today marks seventeen years since I started Phoronix.com for what would become the leading Linux hardware reviews and benchmarking site. The 5th of June also marks 13 years now since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for leading open-source benchmarking...

Adding to other networking changes queuing up for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, NVMeTCP Offload has begun landing into "net-next" ahead of this next kernel merge window...

Due to not too old versions of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) possibly generating bad code with the "-O3" compiler optimization level and sometimes there not being performance benefits, Linus Torvalds remains against using this optimization flag when compiling the Linux kernel...

It's been a few releases since there has been much in the way of new additions to Wine-Staging worth talking about. This staging/experimental version of Wine has at some points carried 700+ patches over upstream Wine but with not many new patches introduced recently while the flow of patches from staging to upstream Wine continuing, at this point its down to "only" 571 patches. With today's Wine-Staging 6.10 there are also some new improvements incorporated into this build...

Next week will mark the release of the Plasma 5.22 desktop with its Wayland support now much more mature alongside various performance improvements and a variety of other enhancements. Plasma 5.22 is a big step forward while already some feature work is going into Plasma 5.23 and the next round of KDE application updates...

As another cork to pop on the Phoronix 17th birthday weekend, Wine 6.10 has been released for running Windows applications and games on Linux...

While waiting for NVIDIA to publicly launch a beta of their much anticipated 470 Linux driver series, today they issued a new 470.76 release of their WSL "Windows Subsystem for Linux" driver...

Recently we have been running a number of compiler benchmarks looking at the recently released LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 open-source code compilers. There is as healthy and competitive competition as ever between GCC and Clang with the mainline Linux kernel these days working well under Clang, more software projects shifting to Clang by default, and the performance being as tight as ever between GCC and Clang for compiled C/C++ code on x86_64 and AArch64. In today's article are benchmarks of Clang 12 vs. GCC 11 on the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake server.

With the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, the USB sound driver will ideally exhibit lower latency when starting playback...

The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS continues advancing with work ranging from their hardware support and low-level kernel features up through user-interface work...

WASM3 v0.5 released this week for that WebAssembly interpreter that claims to be the fastest. The Wasmer WebAssembly runtime for WASI/EmScripten meanwhile released its initial 2.0 release candidates this week where it's been upping the performance...

Ahead of the long-awaited Atari VCS game console launching this month, the SDL2 library has added the mapping for the Linux game console's controllers...

Arm has released version 3.0 of its encoder for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the lossy compression algorithm popular with OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan that is royalty-free and available through official extensions...

Following last week's stable release of Chrome 91, Google has now promoted Chrome 92 to beta...

One of the elusive kernel patch series we have been eager to see for the mainline Linux kernel has just been spun up a fourth time...

While CentOS Linux 8 is being discontinued at the end of the year in favor of Red Hat focusing those resources on CentOS Stream, CentOS Linux 8 2105 was released today as the newest version that is now based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 sources...

Following this week's big AMD keynote at the virtual Computex 2021, AMD just sent out emails teasing another launch event coming next week...

NVM Express Inc today published NVMe 2.0 as a family/library of specifications rather than being a monolithic specification in order to allow them to advance faster and independently of each other...

NVIDIA has now published the 460.84 Linux driver as the latest in their long-lived 460 driver series...

AMD has submitted their latest batch of feature work on the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver to DRM-Next of new material queuing for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle...

The GRUB bootloader saw some fresh feature work merged this week...

WASM3 v0.5 has been released for this project that calls itself the fastest WebAssembly interpreter as well as the most universal WebAssembly run-time. WASM3 runs across all major operating systems and can also run on WebAssembly itself / self-hosting, run on MCUs, and run in other environments...

Dbus-Broker 29 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this high-performance Linux message broker that retains compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation...

A new release is now available of DXVK-NVAPI, the currently separate portion from DXVK that provides an experimental implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI for Direct3D 11 games using this public NVIDIA driver API...

Mesa 21.1.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release for the latest stable Mesa 3D series...

Blender has introduced the Blender 2.93 LTS 3D creation suite as their last major milestone of the Blender 2.x series before moving to the next-generation 3D creation pipeline with Blender 3.0...

AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver developers have sent out their initial support for the yet-to-be-released "Yellow Carp" RDNA graphics card...

NVIDIA this week at Computex Taipei announced the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti while today the actual review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti as this new flagship gaming graphics card. Here are our initial benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti under Linux.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 is now officially available as this latest openSUSE Linux distribution release built using the same exact binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise...

Along with various open-source projects leaving the Freenode IRC network following infighting/managerial changes at Freenode, Fosshost that provides web hosting services for many open-source projects also shifted from Freenode to Libera.Chat. But now this week, Fosshost announced they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode...

On top of everything else going on in May ahead of Phoronix turning 17, there were several new benchmarks / test profiles added for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org and numerous updates to existing test profiles...

Libinput as the input handling library commonly used these days by the Linux desktop both under X.Org and Wayland environments is out with version 1.18 as its newest feature release...

Besides Cloud-Hypervisor, another open-source virtualization hypervisor that continues to be developed by Intel is HAXM as the Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager...

Announced last year by AMD was SmartShift Technology for laptops with both AMD CPUs and GPUs to allow dynamically shifting the power budget between the CPU/GPU depending upon the current workload. AMD promoted SmartShift as delivering up to 14% extra performance and now this technology is being worked on for their Linux driver...

Zink as Mesa's OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan continues seeing a lot of work particularly by Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve. The latest is a major rework to Zink's shader cache implementation so it will actually work as desired and in an optimal manner...

OBS Studio 27.0 is out as the latest major feature release to this cross-platform, open-source software for desktop screen recording and livestreaming...

In addition to the GCC 9.4 release today, the GCC Steering Committee announced today that they are dropping their long-running policy of requiring copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for all code contributions...

Mozilla is kicking off June by shipping Firefox 89.0 with their latest revisions to their user interface...

While GCC 11 is the latest stable compiler series for the GNU Compiler Collection, for those still making use of GCC 9 that initially debuted in 2019 there is a new point release this week...