Phoronix

Finally with the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle is support for Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync for Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe Graphics and newer...

Announced a few years ago was the notion of "extended" LTS kernel versions whereby the long term support cycle would span six years rather than the usual two years for LTS kernels in providing maintenance and bug/security fixes to the codebase. This means Linux 5.4 LTS is supported until the end of 2025, Linux 4.19 until the end of 2024, and even Linux 4.14 until the start of 2024. But with the recently minted Linux 5.10 LTS at least for now it's only being committed to maintenance until the end of next year...

A new Radeon power management feature with RDNA2 graphics processors being exposed by the open-source Linux driver is Duty Cycle Scaling in the name of power/thermal management with a focus on low-power hardware...

Feature development on LLVM 12.0 has ended along with associated sub-projects like Clang and libc++. Feature work now shifts to LLVM 13.0 while the LLVM 12 stable release should be out in just over one month's time...

Nearly a decade ago we were intrigued by Unvanquished as one of the most interesting open-source game/engine projects of the time. It was peculiar in going through dozens of alpha releases prior to drying up a few years ago. There hasn't been any major release yet past the prior alpha state but the project is in fact still moving along and issued their first new (point) release of the year as well as rolling out a new online updater...

A late change to GCC 11 is recognizing the -std=c++23 compiler option but without actually enabling any new features of this next major version of the C++ programming language...

Just last week Apache Superset was promoted to being a top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Superset is around big data visualizations and business intelligence solutions through data exploration while now Apache ECharts has joined it as the latest top-level project...

For nearly one year Broadcom engineers have been working on Linux mainline drivers for their VK accelerators. Finally with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel the support is in place for those Broadcom Viper and Valkyrie accelerator cards...

Intel today announced Iris Xe (DG1) discrete graphics cards are coming to OEMs with ASUS and Colorful being among the initial partners...

NVIDIA has released 460.39 as their latest stable Linux proprietary graphics driver build...

A few days ago we wrote about Linux 5.12 to see support for the Nintendo 64 more than two decades after that MIPS-based video game console first shipped. While the practicality of Linux on the Nintendo 64 is particularly limited given only 4~8MB of RAM and the MIPS64 NEC VR4300 clocked under 100MHz, it's going upstream and now the N64 controller driver is also queued for this next kernel cycle...

Not only are some old ARM platforms and some obsolete, obscure CPU architectures on the chopping block for some spring cleaning in the Linux kernel, but the Intel Moorestown and Medfield "Mobile Internet Device" platforms are being phased out from the Linux kernel this spring as well...

GNOME 40 is now available as the first step towards releasing this updated Linux desktop environment in March...

Mozilla Firefox 85.0 is available today as the open-source web browser's first major release of the year...

GParted as the widely used, GUI solution for managing Linux partitions/file-systems on the Linux desktop now finally supports dealing with exFAT file-systems...

While the initial AMD Linux 5.11 performance regression written about at the end of last year was of much concern given the performance hits to AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 processors with the out-of-the-box "Schedutil" governor, with a pending patch the regression is not only addressed but in various workloads we continue seeing better performance than even compared to Linux 5.10. Here is the latest from several more days of extensive performance testing.

Last month marked the release of the big Radeon Open eCosystem 4.0 update (ROCm 4.0) while today that has been replaced by a v4.0.1 point release...

Today marks five years since AMD began the GPUOpen initiative for providing more open-source Radeon GPU code projects, code samples, and more for better engaging GPU/game developers in the open...

Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over...

Those working on VKD3D-Proton as the Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API are beginning to work on DirectX Ray-Tracing support but it isn't yet ready for gamers...

It looks like the open-source Intel kernel driver enablement work for the "Alder Lake S" processors coming to market late in the year will soon have the support mainlined in the kernel...

The Apache Software Foundation that oversees 340+ Apache projects saw a measurable rise in security related issues during the course of 2020...

Today's Vulkan 1.2.168 specification update brings the usual specification corrections/clarifications while also introducing two new KHR extensions...

Last week marked the last Q/A session for the UBports' Ubuntu Touch team working to advance the Linux smartphone platform where they laid out some of their upcoming objectives...

Last quarter Intel began upstreaming their open-source Alder Lake S graphics support for Linux. It hasn't been too big of a feat or revealed many details since it's still Gen12 / Xe graphics seen since Tiger Lake. But it's been coming along and over the past month is now wired up into Intel's open-source Media Driver stack too...

The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

With this past week's release of Pyston 2.1 as an alternative Python interpreter I was curious to see how the performance compared to that of upstream Python... So here are some weekend benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system...

GNU Binutils 2.36 is out today as the latest version of this collection of binary utilities for Linux/open-source systems...

The Linux kernel mentor program for the spring 2021 period is now accepting applications...

Intel's latest open-source Linux driver contribution is a hinge driver that is set to debut with Linux 5.12...

While GTK 4.0 has been released, there still is major work to look forward to with future GTK4 releases. One area seeing recent and ongoing improvements is with the toolkit's OpenGL renderer...

With the upcoming GCC 11 compiler release the GNU compiler's just-in-time (JIT) library is no longer considered to be of alpha quality...

Two years and nine patches later, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.17 is out as the latest X.Org driver update for this open-source NVIDIA driver component...

Voltage, temperature, and fan speed reporting among desktop motherboards under Linux remains one of the unfortunate areas even in 2021... Many SIO ICs remain publicly undocumented and the Linux driver support is often left up to the community and usually through reverse-engineering. Thus the mainline Linux kernel support is left to suffer especially among newer desktop motherboards. At least for Linux 5.12 some ASRock motherboards will begin seeing their voltage/temperature reporting now function...

For those interested in Godot as the premiere open-source 2D/3D game engine or just looking for some interesting technical talks to enjoy this weekend, the first GodotCon Online is today...

One of many improvements we have been looking forward to with GNOME 40 is Mutter now having a separate input thread with its native back-end for Wayland...

In addition to shipping the Plasma 5.21 beta this week, KDE developers were very active in not only working out fixes for next month's Plasma 5.21 desktop but also other improvements to KDE applications...

Adding to the list of big ticket changes for GNOME 40 is Mutter now supporting atomic mode-setting...

Pyston started out as a fork of CPython and was very promising during its early days as a Dropbox project for delivering on high performance Python. Its performance was great but in 2017 Dropbox stopped supporting it. Then at the end of 2020, Pyston reappeared and Pyston 2.0 promoted ~20% faster performance than Python 3.8. Pyston 2.x was developed by many of the original developers from Dropbox now out working on their own firm...

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa on a nice upward trajectory with most recently now having the backing of a Valve contract developer and a focus on getting the backlog of patches to this Gallium3D code upstreamed, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at where the performance currently stands when using Zink atop the RADV Vulkan driver compared to using the native RadeonSI driver with this round of testing from a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle...

It's taken nearly twenty five years but the mainline Linux kernel this year will be able to boot on the Nintendo 64 game console... It's looking like the Nintendo 64 support will be merged with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel...

New feature material for Linux 5.12 continues getting ready ahead of the merge window opening in February to formally kick off the cycle...

In addition to Oracle's GraalVM 21.0 being released this week, the Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 v0.24 as the newest feature release for their high performance JVM...

Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser...

The Apache Software Foundation announced on Thursday that Apache Superset reached "top-level" status...

The oneAPI Level Zero repository consisting of the Level Zero API headers, Level Zero loader, and validation layer have reached version 1.1...

It was just earlier this month that mainline Mesa achieved OpenGL 4.1 for Zink, the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to be implemented atop Vulkan. Now OpenGL 4.2 support is in place for this promising Mesa component...

Not only is the AMD "CPU frequency invariance regression" from that new support with the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel on course to address the performance shortcomings I outlined last month, but with the patched kernel for a number of workloads the performance is now ahead of where it was at with Linux 5.10.

KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year...