Phoronix

Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series...

With yesterday's launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it's the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD's closed-source "PRO" Vulkan driver distributed as part of the "Radeon Software for Linux" package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.

DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path...

The open-source V3DV driver living within Mesa for providing Vulkan API support for modern Broadcom VideoCore graphics -- most notably found in the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer -- is nearing Vulkan 1.1 compliance...

The latest patch series from Intel engineers worth noting for the Linux kernel is around implementing support for on-demand "unaccepted memory". Unaccepted memory is supported by the latest-generation AMD EPYC processors but not yet supported under Linux for on-demand/as-needed handling while Intel is preparing the kernel support for their next-gen Xeon CPUs having this capability...

It's been less than one week since the AMDVLK 2021.Q3.3 update for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver while today AMD has issued its latest update...

Polychromatic as the long-running, third-party, open-source project to allow Razer's gaming peripherals like mice and keyboard to be configured under Linux is out with a major update...

While Libre-SoC began as "Libre RISC-V" envisioned as a low-power graphics/Vulkan accelerator, it has morphed into a hybrid CPU/GPU design built on OpenPOWER and in very early form seeing test fabrication on a TSMC 180nm process. The latest funding received is now working on adding cryptographic improvements to it and/or the upstream OpenPOWER ISA...

Intel has another big batch of open-source kernel graphics driver updates it sent out to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle. The DG2 graphics card is getting wired up while this pull request does also finally remove the Cannon Lake "Gen 10" graphics that never materialized in commercial products...

Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced "Lightway" as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source...

The Elementary OS Linux distribution known for its very polished and well crafted desktop experience is out with its big 6.0 "Odin" update...

With the Radeon RX 6600 XT review embargo lifted and the cards set to hit retail channels this week, the Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver has been released in now officially supporting the RX 6600 series...

SDL 2.0.16 is officially out today as the latest update to this widely-used cross-platform library for serving as an abstraction layer around graphics, controllers / input, and more that makes it widely used by cross-platform games as well as the likes of the Steam Runtime...

NVIDIA today released their latest stable driver update in the 470 series for Linux users...

The Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced at the end of July as AMD's newest RDNA2 graphics card and is optimized for a performant 1080p gaming experience. For those wondering about its performance, this morning the embargo lifts to be able to talk about its performance. Here are the first Linux gaming benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT against a wide assortment of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Firefox 91.0 is out this morning as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's cross-platform web browser...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on a number of improvements in recent days to the RADV Vulkan driver's handling around delta color compression (DCC) fast clears...

Future AMD CPUs -- potentially AMD EPYC 7004 "Genoa" -- will be supporting 5-level paging...

Intel's Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used by their Windows driver as well as the Intel Compute Runtime for OpenCL / Level Zero support (and potentially the Mesa drivers in the future) has now landed Alder Lake P enablement...

It looks like X.Org Server 21.1 (long in development the past few years as X.Org Server 1.21) will see a stable release in the coming weeks...

Intel's next-generation C/C++ compilers are fully leveraging the LLVM compiler stack in place of their former proprietary compiler code-base. Intel has "complete[d] adoption" of LLVM moving forward for their C/C++ compiler needs...

The latest AMD SEV work happening to the Linux kernel for benefiting EPYC servers with virtualization is the new "sev_secret" module for allowing guests to access confidential computing secret areas...

For more than one year now Oracle engineers have been working on Trenchboot support for securely booting the Linux kernel. Sent out today is the third revision of this work for establishing a dynamic root of trust for measurement...

Last month after Microsoft began publishing their Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, I ran some early Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Linux led in those benchmarks on the AMD Zen 3 desktop while for those wondering if that still holds true for Intel hardware, here are benchmarks of a Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" desktop with Windows 10 21H1, Windows 11 in its latest preview build as of testing, and then compared to Arch Linux / Clear Linux / Ubuntu.

Audio/video encoders and decoders are one of the areas where usage of the Rust programming language has increasing interest for speed and safety. One of the most promising Rust-written encoders at the moment is Rav1e for AV1 video encoding and it's now working towards its v0.5 release...

Merged one month ago was RadeonSI enabling by default its optimization to replace uniforms with literals inside shaders. This uniform inlining helped with SPECViewPerf and other workloads but it turns out in the process sharply drove up CPU usage when running some games...

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is expected later this month as the next point release to the "Focal Fossa" long-term support cycle. With this update comes the hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 21.04 which in turn means Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.0 graphics support is available as package updates now...

Synopsys is looking to phase out support for the oldest ARC processors found within the mainline Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.14 and he's happy with how it's shaping up a few weeks before release...

0 A.D. as the long in development real-time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games is out with its twenty-fifth alpha release...

Thunderbird 91.0 is approaching release as an annual feature release to this open-source, cross-platform mail client and RSS reader. Given the current release is Thunderbird 78 from last July, there is a lot in store for this "2021" update...

The Linux kernel already supports making use of Arm's True Random Number Generator (TRNG) SMCCC interface within the random seed code while for the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle an "arm_smccc_trng" driver is being added and will allow exposing the entropy to user-space...

Intel engineers on Friday submitted a big batch of kernel graphics driver improvements to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The months-long effort for adding DRM lease support to Wayland via a new protocol has now been merged into Wayland Protocols as a new staging addition. The "drm_lease_v1" is principally motivated for improving the virtual reality head-mounted dispkay support under Wayland...

It's been two years already since Latte Dock 0.9 was released while finally Latte Dock 0.10 is ready to officially meet the world this weekend...

The first week of August saw many fixes land in the KDE camp as they prepare for their software to be used on more third-party products, with Steam Deck being just the latest notable product leveraging KDE...

Last week's AMDGPU pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.15 added support for the "Cyan Skillfish" APU and other early work while an additional pull request was submitted on Friday...

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine...

In recent months there has been an effort to update GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to reflect the GTK4 toolkit and recommendations around new widgets, utility panes, and more for enhancing the accessibility of GNOME applications, arguably looking better, and just otherwise modernizing aspects of the HIG that haven't been touched in months. That updated GNOME HIG is now official...

AMD has published their newest open-source Vulkan driver snapshot from their official sources that comprise this "AMDVLK" offering for Linux users...

After the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced last week and ahead of the retail availability next week, today AMD's "unboxing embargo" has expired for this new RDNA2 graphics card focused on delivering high 1080p frame rates. The card we have been testing out under Linux is the ASRock Phantom Gaming RX 6600 XT.

Mozilla is trying once again to enable AVIF image decoding support by default within the Firefox web browser. AVIF is the promising image file format based on using AV1 in the HEIF file format...

Amazon's Data Access Monitor "DAMON" code is now set for introduction in Linux 5.15...

Intel security researchers have been working on implementing toolchain-optimized fine-grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support on top of Intel's hardware-based Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). By leveraging Intel CET, the Control-Flow Integrity overhead is much lower than the otherwise pure software/compiler-based approach. This Linux security improvement is being worked on under the name of FineIBT...

Flax Engine 1.2.6222 is out today as the first v1.2 update for this cross-platform, open-source but commercial game engine...

The ongoing FUTEX2 work for making the futex handling more like Windows to in turn help Windows games on Linux via Wine (with a focus on Steam Play's Proton) has taken a new turn...

This summer we have been testing the Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE as one of the company's newest options for those in the market for an AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" 1U 1P barebones server. Across our wide range of Linux and BSD benchmarking this Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE with Tyan S8036GM2NE motherboard has been holding up well and meeting our requirements and proven reliability in having tested Tyan products now at Phoronix for over the past 16 years.

While Samba is well known for SMB/CIFS server support on Linux and other platforms for supporting Microsoft's SMB networking protocol for file and print services, Samba is implemented in user-space while Samsung has been pursuing an SMB server implemented in kernel-space for better performance and wiring up new features that can be more easily accomplished within the kernel...

Merged into the GNU Compiler Collection development code on Wednesday was an initial implementation of Assembly support for its analyzer...

Mesa 21.2 is out as the latest quarterly update to this open-source Linux graphics driver stack for user-space, most notably providing the Intel and Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers among others...