Phoronix

Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week...

Back in September at the end of the Linux 5.15 merge window was our Linux 5.15 feature overview but given the time since then and that the Linux 5.15 stable kernel will likely be released this evening, here is a recap of the most interesting changes in this new kernel version...

After memory folios failed to make it into Linux 5.15, this low-level change to the kernel memory management code that has possible performance implications is looking to land for Linux 5.16...

Back in February 2020 SDL2 began seeing early work for RISC OS support. Now being merged this weekend to this key library used by many cross-platform games is now more functioning support for the RISC OS Arm-based operating system...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe has prepared his various pull requests ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has landed native support for OpenRISC on Linux and GDB server support...

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan open-source driver "RADV" is preparing to introduce experimental support for mesh shaders...

Mozilla Firefox 94 will begin using its EGL back-end on the Linux desktop in conjunction with supported graphics drivers in order to provide better performance, lower power usage, and other benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.23 offers much better Plasma Wayland support than prior releases but still the journey of polished Wayland support on-par with X11 is not over. KDE developers ended out October working on more Wayland fixes along with other improvements to this open-source desktop...

OpenVDB is the software open-sourced by DreamWorks Animations that is now part of the Academy Software Foundation as a sparse volume data structure and associating tooling with a particular focus on visual effects and animations for film production. OpenVDB 9.0 is out today as the latest major update to this library...

While Ardour is arguably the most well known open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solution, there are also other offerings like Zrythm and others while now "Stargate" is the newest option available...

Project Trident had been an operating system originally based on TrueOS/FreeBSD before shifting to Void Linux as its base and worked on various innovations like OpenZFS-based root installations but now the developers behind the ambitious advanced desktop OS project have decided to call it quits...

While there has been less major progress to report on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan code in recent weeks, Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve and others continue optimizing and fixing this increasing useful implementation. Most recently the game Bioshock: Infinite is running on Zink and there are more fixes in aiming toward OpenGL 4.6 conformance...

In early September AMD posted their new "amd-pstate" CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux that leverages ACPI CPPC data available with Zen 2 and newer processors for making wiser frequency scaling decisions. The goal of AMD P-State is to offer better performance-per-Watt and today they have posted a new revision of this driver...

Well known AMD open-source OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has landed another big batch of patches to further lower the driver overhead of this Linux OpenGL driver...

Earlier this year was talk of finally retiring the Intel "i965" Mesa classic OpenGL driver along with the rest of the "classic Mesa" driver code now that it's been replaced by the Crocus Gallium3D driver and the other open-source Mesa OpenGL divers all using the modern Gallium3D architecture. Those plans are still on but shifting now into 2022...

With X.Org Server 21.1 having finally shipped this week, the X.Org Server Autotools build system support has been killed off...

A set of patches improving the return trampoline "Retpoline" code used for Spectre V2 mitigations has made its way into tip.git's "objtool/core" staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

It's been nine months since the release of Wayland 1.19 while now release plans have been drafted for Wayland 1.20...

Running the newest Steam client beta paired with the newest Proton Experimental should yield more Windows games working on Steam Play with Linux...

Amazon Web Services today announced the open-source Babelfish for PostgreSQL server project. Babelfish allows for applications written against Microsoft SQL Server to work seamlessly with PostgreSQL...

After dealing with blocker bugs the past two weeks, Fedora 35 is now confirmed for releasing next week...

Disclosed last year by Arm was their processors affected by a straight-line speculation vulnerability. In this case the processor could speculatively execute instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. There has been talk about possible straight-line speculation on x86/x86_64 but without any action while now GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler developers along with Linux kernel developers are preparing such mitigation support...

The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged...

As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.

With Blender 3.0 releasing soon, the Blender project has published a Blender 3.x road-map outlining some of their plans for future releases...

It's been six years already since VESA published the Embedded DisplayPort 1.4b specification while finally it's been succeeded by eDP 1.5...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is launching the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as their newest single board computer succeeding the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W...

If you happen to have a Nitrokey FIDO U2F as a two-factor authentication key, proper Linux support is about to land. While at launch it mentioned working out-of-the-box across all major browsers and platforms -- including Linux -- a change is needed to the kernel that's now on the way for the 5.16 cycle...

One could consider it long overdue, but DragonFlyBSD has finally merged support for FAT file-systems with the makefs utility...

The latest weekly test release of Mesa 21.3 is now available ahead of the anticipated stable debut in November...

Project Wakefield is the recently established OpenJDK initiative to implement native Wayland support within Java...

X.Org Server 21.1 is now officially available as this first xorg-server update in three years and what began development as X.Org Server 1.21 prior to the versioning change...

Intel is using their inaugural Intel Innovation virtual event today to formally announce the highly-anticipated 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors. These first desktop processors built on their "Intel 7" process and employ a hybrid architecture will be available in retail channels next week. Today we can talk more about Alder Lake specifications and features while our Linux performance benchmarks and support analysis will come once the Alder Lake review embargo expires next week.

Along with announcing Alder Lake and other hardware advancements, Intel is using their new Innovation event kicking off today to also talk more about their vast collection of software... This follows Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's comments from earlier in the week around a bias towards open-source and a pledge to openness. As part of this, Intel is today announcing a new and unified Developer Zone...

It's been just shy of one month since Qt 6.2 debuted as the first Qt6 Long-Term Support (LTS) release and ported many of the remaining modules over from Qt5. Shipping today is now Qt 6.2.1 as the first point release with more than two-hundred fixes...

After stalling last year when it was queued up in HID's "for-5.10/nintendo" branch only to not make it into HID-next at the time, that threshold has now been crossed with the latest Nintendo Switch controller driver now ready for introduction in Linux 5.16. This open-source driver enables the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con and Pro controllers to work under Linux with a mainline kernel driver...

Along with the Apple Silicon PCIe driver, another new driver for supporting Apple Silicon (primarily with a focus on the Apple M1 for now) with the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle is a new pinctrl/GPIO driver...

The MSM DRM driver for supporting the open-source display/graphics support with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs has submitted their main feature pull request to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

Pyston as the alternative Python implementation open-sourced originally by Dropbox is forming ambitious plans for a bright future...

It's been over one year since Intel disclosed Advanced Matrix Extensions and began posting patches for bringing up AMX support under Linux in anticipation of Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors. While the compiler-side work to GCC and LLVM/Clang has been landing, finally with the forthcoming Linux 5.16 cycle that AMX support appears ready for landing...

Following the NVIDIA 495 beta Linux driver from earlier this month, NVIDIA 495.44 is out today for Linux users as the stable release...

Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions. First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system.

With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" beginning development, Canonical is soliciting community feedback as they plot out more of the planned changes for this next major release and areas to focus on enhancing over the next six months...

Last week I mentioned how Mesa landed Vulkan 1.1 support for the V3DV driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. With those changes in Mesa Git, The Khronos Group has now officially granted this driver Vulkan 1.1 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4...

AMDGPU changes already queued up in DRM-Next for Linux 5.16 brought initial code for DisplayPort 2.0 ahead of next-gen GPUs with this connectivity support. Sent out today as a separate pull request is wiring up the DisplayPort 2.0 Multi-Stream Transport (MST) capability for the AMDGPU kernel driver...

A new pull request is pending for implementing multi-queue block (blk-mq) support within OpenZFS' Zvol code, which can lead to sizable performance benefits...

While the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs are a decade old, the mainline Linux kernel continues working to improve the power management / thermal behavior for them in order to deal with heating issues for devices relying on these SoCs...

Linus Torvalds normally releases new kernel versions on Sundays like clockwork, but yesterday was one of the rare occasions where that trend was interrupted...