Phoronix

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...

Over the past month on Phoronix there was a lot of excitement by readers around the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel, Mesa advancements, notable new software releases like dav1d and Zstd 1.5, new hardware benchmarking around Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and AMD's latest wares, and more...

Earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico with RP2040 microcontroller for doing embedded development. Now that RP2040 chip is being sold for just $1 USD via their resellers for those wanting to build their own electronics with this Raspberry Pi silicon...

At AMD's Computex Taipei 2021 keynote they announced FidelityFX Super Resolution as coming later this month as their own open-source alternative to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling for image upscaling while gaming. While we are waiting to see how the Linux support for FidelityFX Super Resolution will play out, NVIDIA is already trying to one up them by announcing DLSS for Steam Play...

For being a virtual event, AMD's keynote for Computex Taipei 2021 is filled with quite a bit of excitement and multiple product announcements. Here are the highlights for AMD's new announcements at Computex 2021.

AMD currently just supports Vulkan ray-tracing with their Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards while now there is independent work being done on Mesa's unofficial Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) to allow ray-tracing to work with older generations of GPUs like Vega and Polaris...

This week on 5 June marks 17 years since starting Phoronix.com for Linux hardware reviews and also 13 years since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.0 for advancing open-source/Linux benchmarking...

Genode OS as the from-scratch open-source operating system framework built atop a micro-kernel abstraction layer and various original user-space components is out with its version 21.05 update...

One of Valve's many open-source projects is GameNetworkingSockets as a basic transport layer for games to handle UDP-based messaging, P2P networking, encryption, IPv6, and other network handling functionality of particular use to games / game engines...

In recent months there has been a lot of Linux kernel patches for bringing up Alder Lake S and Alder Lake P while more recently the enablement patches for Alder Lake M low-power mobile has begun...

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has landed the latest XWayland improvements into X.Org Server Git for primarily benefiting the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack...

Simple CPU throttling isn't sufficient for cooling some NVIDIA Tegra devices running the upstream Linux kernel so thermal cooling integration into the device frequency "devfreq" scaling code is in the work for such high performance NVIDIA SoCs...

Intel is kicking off Computex Taipei 2021 week by announcing new 11th Gen Intel Core processors as well as Intel 5G Solution 5000 as their first 5G product intended for next-gen PCs...

Linux 5.13-rc4 is out this US Memorial Day weekend and it has ticked up to being a rather large weekly test release...

While there are no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 shipping anytime soon, being merged today to the Git code-base is bumping X Input to version 2.4 with the introduction of touchpad gestures...

The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end...

With May quickly drawing to a close, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmark figures for the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their respective latest Linux graphics drivers while looking at the performance across a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan games/workloads...

Linux kernel developer Konstantin Ryabitsev has been working on Patatt as a cryptographic-based patch attestation system. While started a while ago, there is renewed interest in such patch attestation following the University of Minnesota "hypocrite commit" debacle...

While the official/reference Rust compiler implementation is LLVM-based, there continues to be the independent effort working on a GCC Rust front-end as an alternative full implementation of the Rust programming language...

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer will feature improved support for a new MikroTik 10G/25G NIC...

RenderDoc 1.14 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform / cross-API graphics debugger...

KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow...

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver for Linux is poised to report more graphics throttling status information to user-space...

Released today was a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS (nee Raspbian) with various improvements over its prior update from March...

Yet another release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing and this time around there are some interesting changes to note...

While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.

Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks...

Last year we wrote about Dell working on a hardware privacy driver for Linux as with 2021 laptops they are beginning to add hardware-based privacy buttons for disabling microphone and camera support. That Dell Hardware Privacy platform support is now set to be introduced to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.14...