Phoronix

NVIDIA announced from the Game Developers Conference this week that they have been working to bring RTX ray-tracing support with their graphics cards to also work on Arm hardware running Linux...

Back in April Devuan 4.0 alpha builds began for this Debian fork/downstream that aims for init system freedom by allowing Debian GNU/Linux to work without a dependence on systemd. Devuan 4.0 is tracking upstream Debian 11 quite closely with its changes...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has unanimously approved a large number of new Fedora 35 features this week...

The open-source Meson build system that continues to be increasingly used by open-source projects and other software is out with version 0.59, which continues tacking on more features...

Ultra App Kit is a new cross-platform, user interface toolkit option focused on satisfying the needs of game engines/tooling but also covering needs for other desktop GUI applications...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.14-rc2 as the latest weekly test candidate of the maturing Linux 5.14 kernel...

Out this Sunday is the latest update to GNU Binutils as this important collection of binary utilities common to Linux and other platforms...

With the alpha release of the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine approaching, a blog post today detailed the current graphics API support plans around this major game engine update...

Thanks to Canonical's distributed workforce with most of their employees working from home even pre-pandemic and the booming Linux ecosystem, the Ubuntu maker performed very well over 2020 and even grew its headcount back above 500 employees and managed to swing from a loss in 2019 to a profit in 2020...

For those that may have upgraded to an Intel Tiger Lake notebook and making use of the Gen12 Xe Graphics while running a distribution like Ubuntu 21.04, if you are wondering whether upgrading the kernel or Mesa are worthwhile here are some benchmarks...

Early work is underway on Coreboot for AMD's Barcelo as the successor to Lucienne...

Linux 5.15 later this year will bring improvements to the kernel side of Open vSwitch, the open-source virtual multi-layer switch implementation that is commonly used in large virtualized environments...

Following the soft freeze and hard freeze, Debian 11 "Bullseye" is now under a full freeze ahead of its official Debian 11 stable release...

Released on Friday was a new version of the Hashcat open-source password recovery tool that now adds an AMD HIP back-end...

With the recent release of System76's Pop!_OS 21.04 if you are thinking about upgrading to this release from Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS or choosing between the two, here are some benchmarks from the AMD Ryzen Threadripper powered System76 Thelio Major.

One year ago was the surprise of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS Linux kernel driver. The Paragon "NTFS3" kernel driver provides much better read/write support for Microsoft's NTFS file-system than what is available with other kernel or FUSE options for this file-system support on Linux. It looks like this driver might finally be mainlined soon...

AMD's PMC Linux driver with Linux 5.15 is expected to offer more debugging information for diagnosing S0ix power states behavior to analyze if an AMD SoC is hitting or not the desired low-power states...

In between celebrating the fact that Valve's newly announced Steam Deck runs KDE Plasma when exiting the Steam confines, KDE developers had a very busy week with a number of different improvements to their open-source desktop...

The Open 3D Engine spun out of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine has been seeing progress on Vulkan 1.2 API work as well as Linux porting at large, including the bringing up of the game engine's editor on Linux...

The KWinFT fork of KDE's KWin compositor has landed its support for using the WLROOTS Wayland library...

The newest performance optimization merged this week for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan open-source driver is NGG culling for Navi 1x/2x graphics cards. NGG Culling "NGGC" isn't enabled by default at this time but can be easily activated and depending upon the software under test can provide some minor performance gains on top of all the other optimizations seen in recent times for RADV.

An early batch of "drm-misc-next" changes has been sent to DRM-Next for queuing to ultimately land with the Linux 5.15 kernel...

Recently in Coreboot Git has been more work on expanding its (experimental) 64-bit mode for execution...

At the start of 2020 Amazon engineers sent out a "request for comments" around DAMON as a new kernel feature to monitor data accesses and can be used for purposes like analyzing over-committed memory use, debugging, and other optimizations. DAMON has now seen thirty-four revisions to the patches but it looks like it could finally be in a state for mainlining in the Linux kernel...

The latest surprise news under Intel's new leadership is that they are reported to be exploring a deal to acquire GlobalFoundries, the company ultimately formed when AMD decided in 2008 to spin off their semiconductor manufacturing business...

For those that find themselves using an Apple Magic Mouse, the finger-sliding scrolling experience should be improved come Linux 5.15...

For nearly one year already we've been delivering many Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarks using the Core i7 1165G7 while for those curious about the i7-1185G7 that is becoming more common with newer notebooks, here are some benchmarks of the Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake against various other notebooks/processors on hand for comparison.

For those wanting to get into open-source firmware development or even just to have a small SOHO x86_64 low-cost Intel server platform that is as open as possible, ASRock Rack happens to now boast one of the best solutions...

Following months of rumors about new gaming hardware from Valve, today they announced Steam Deck as a new handheld PC gaming device starting at $399...

After AMD posted FidelityFX Super Resolution last month with various initial launch titles, the source code to this NVIDIA DLSS alternative is now publicly available...

Each PHP release continues to improve in the department of performance. Even after the sizable performance improvements made with PHP 7, PHP 8 is continuing to further optimize the performance regardless of using its new JIT. While there still are several months to go until the official PHP 8.1 release, here are a few early benchmarks looking at the PHP CLI performance of PHP 8.1 and prior PHP releases...

It was just four years ago the AMDGPU kernel driver was nearly one million lines of code and earlier this year began nearing three million lines. Now with Linux 5.14-rc1 released this week it is at over 3.3 million lines for this kernel graphics driver...

Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has sent out his 14th revision to the memory "folios" patch-set for this new struct that aims to improve Linux's memory management code and ultimately better performance...

Patches have been posted for wiring up Display Stream Compression (DSC) support for the Qualcomm MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver...

Landing into "hwmon-next" just after the Linux 5.14-rc1 tagging that marks the formal end to feature work for the current cycle was the k10temp driver adding support for AMD Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring under Linux...

Mesa 21.2 feature development is now over and the first release candidate issued for this next quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers...

The UBports folks have released Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 as their latest over-the-air update for this mobile Linux platform. Notable with this release is what isn't there - the Ubuntu 20.04 base. Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 continues using now the five year old Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base while the migration to 20.04 is still in progress...

It's well known that the Linux desktop can be quite unbearable when under heavy memory pressure as has been showcased over the years and more attention these days turning to the likes of OOMD/systemd-oomd and other alternatives to better deal with Linux low/out-of-memory scenarios especially with today's desktop software and web browsers consuming increasing amounts of memory. Another effort coming to fruition for helping this scenario is the "le9" Linux kernel patches...

Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed support for Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) culling support as ultimately what should provide another performance win for some workloads...

Now that the DG1 graphics support is beginning to get squared away and with Linux 5.15 will likely be able to boot to an accelerated desktop, bring-up on the DG2 graphics card has begun along with the Xe_HP software development vehicle...

The "Linux Random Number Generator" (LRNG) effort as a new drop-in replacement for /dev/random is now up to its 41st revision and in development for more than five years...

For going along with the newly added support in the MSM DRM kernel driver, Mesa's Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and Turnip Vulkan drivers have landed support for the Adreno 660 and Adreno 635 graphics processors...

One of the patch series I have been looking forward to see land going back to 2018 has been the per-process GPU load statistics or as it's known officially the "per client engine busyness" series. The work didn't land for Linux 5.14 but at least this week the latest revision was posted...

Valve today pushed out their newest stable update to the Steam client for Windows, macOS, and Linux...

For those making use of VirtualBox virtualization and rely on the shared folder functionality via the mainline "VBOXSF" driver for exchanging files between VMs and the host, the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel has an important fix/improvement...

Thanks to one of VMware's Linux engineers there are improvements pending to the AMD IOMMU support code to help with performance...

LibreOffice 7.2 is expected for release before the end of August while today marks the availability of the first release candidate...

With having hands on with a Dell XPS 13 9310 (Dell 0DXP1F) with the Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake processor (compared to prior Linux tests with the i7-1165G7), here is a fresh look at the performance of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro as shipped by Dell with all available stable updates versus a clean install of Ubuntu 21.04 Linux.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 90.0 as the latest monthly update to their cross-platform web browser...

Being worked on for quite a while now by longtime kernel developer Matthew Wilcox of Oracle is memory folios to improve Linux's memory management and allow for greater efficiency. Benchmarks with memory folios have shown for example kernel builds can be up to 7% faster. It's looking like there is a desire to see at least some of this folios code land for Linux 5.15...