Phoronix

Mir, Canonical's Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes...

Back in September I wrote about Intel developers posting Linux enablement patches for their Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 PCIe accelerator for hardware-based load balancing functionality. That work hasn't yet been upstreamed but recently marked its tenth revision to the "DLB 2.0" patches...

Mesa's LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6...

The Mercurial distributed revision control system continues to see use particularly around some large code-base projects and the developers continue working to optimize its performance in part by transitioning more of it to the Rust programming language...

The USB4 / Thunderbolt changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window have been queued into the USB-next tree...

For months System76 has been teasing that they were getting into prototyping and manufacturing their own keyboards. This moves follows them manufacturing their own cases with the beautifully engineered Thelio line-up while now it looks like they are ready to go public with details on the System76 keyboard...

Just in time for the expected Linux 5.11 stable release on Sunday, the AMD frequency invariance performance regression I've been noting and writing about since Christmas day has been resolved with the previously covered fix having been merged today...

The official release of FreeBSD 13.0 is coming up in March, while already from our preliminary tests of the newly minted FreeBSD 13.0 BETA1, the benchmark results are extremely tantalizing compared to FreeBSD 12.2... Ultimately the performance should be much more competitive now compared to Linux (at least on Intel x86_64) and other operating systems with the big FreeBSD 13 release.

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020, having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors...

Announced nearly three years ago by Intel was the ACRN reference hypervisor framework intended for IoT/embedded use-cases with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing. More of the kernel bits to this "Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development" are set to see mainline with the imminent Linux 5.12 kernel cycle...

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly...

In addition to Linux 5.12 positioned to see Lenovo laptop "platform profile" support for controlling the power/thermal behavior of their newer ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops, this next kernel version also has other improvements on the IdeaPad front...

Linspire 10 is out this week as the newest version of this Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows nearly two decades ago. While Linspire went dark for several years, under its current ownership by PC/OpenSystems they have been trying to reinvigorate the desktop distribution the past few years. Linspire 10 represents the latest work for the Ubuntu-based platform...

Going back to last summer there have been patches for getting OpenGL 4.6 with the Zink GL on Vulkan implementation but were considered experimental and not for immediate upstreaming. In the months since and especially after Mike Blumenkrantz was hired by Valve, the upstreaming effort kicked into higher gear. Now with Mesa 21.1, we are up to OpenGL 4.3...

Going back about two years there has been work on properly supporting Wine on POWER 64-bit (PPC64). Now past the Wine 6.0 stable release, it looks like that work that work is finally beginning to land. In conjunction with Hangover to handle the cross-architecture aspect, the hope is to eventually allow Windows x86 programs to work on libre POWER systems or at the very least with native Winelib support to help in porting open-source Windows software to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER...

Valve and their partners at CodeWeavers have put out a release candidate for Proton 5.13-6 as the latest version of their Wine-based software for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play...

The CentOS Hyperscale effort is sounding quite promising for those riding CentOS Stream and wanting fresher packages in some instances and alternative defaults as a blend of CentOS Stream, Fedora / EPEL, and its own forthcoming package repositories...

RADV is a Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs that is part of the Mesa project and installed on most Linux distros out of the box. Our goal is to deliver a stable and performant driver to Linux gamers, and recently we've made our own shader compiler called ACO. To create the best possible experience, we'd like to take it a step further and ask our users for some testing and feedback.

SYCL as the single-source C++-based programming model for heterogeneous parallel programming is now revised to the SYCL 2020 specification released today by The Khronos Group...

While it was a sad blow when PC-BSD/TrueOS stopped pursuing its desktop ambitions as what was arguably the leading BSD desktop operating system out there with a nice end-user experience, since then we have seen efforts like MidnightBSD, GhostBSD, and others fill the avoid with continuing to enhance the out-of-the-box BSD desktop system. A new entrant that is quite interesting is helloSystem that aims to be a "macOS of BSDs" for a polished desktop experience...

Last month was the delightful news that Ubuntu 21.04 is aiming to use Wayland by default for non-NVIDIA systems on the GNOME desktop rather than the X.Org session. While there is two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.04 release, there still is more work ahead in making that shift a reality...

Exfatprogs 1.1 have been released as the open-source, user-space utilities around the Linux/Android exFAT file-system support maintained by Samsung...

While so far only the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Linux supports the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, eventually we will see support for these new Vulkan extensions with the AMD Vulkan drivers for the Radeon RX 6000 series and newer. There has also been work by Intel in preparing for Vulkan ray-tracing with Xe HPG. For when the time comes to test those implementations, there is finally one good, open-source, automated Vulkan RT benchmark so far...

There are a new round of kernel patches posted today by NVIDIA for the open-source, traditionally reverse-engineered "Nouveau" graphics driver: implementing support for SVM atomic memory operations...

The work-in-progress FUTEX2 system call for improving Windows games on Linux via Wine / Steam Play remains one of the items left to be addressed in 2021 with the work on that being funded by Valve and tackled by Collabora engineers...

KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further...

Given the open-source Radeon driver progress for RDNA2 over the past three months since the Radeon RX 6800 series were launched, here is a look at how the Radeon RX 6800 series and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series is currently competing on Linux when using the latest Linux drivers from the respective vendors.

At last month's Linux.Conf.Au virtual conference was a presentation by Google engineer Nick Desaulniers on the current state of building the Linux kernel with LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC...

Mozilla has been sponsoring the Rust programming language for more than a decade while in 2020 as part of Mozilla's big round of layoffs most of the Rust team was let go along with dropping the Servo web engine team. Following that plans were drafted to create the Rust Foundation as an independent entity...

Hitting Mesa 21.1 this morning is a scheduler implementation for Panfrost Gallium3D, the open-source Arm Mali graphics driver...

Intel PXP -- Protected Xe Path -- is a means of hardware-protected sessions for graphics clients on Gen12 / Xe Graphics. The support code for enabling PXP with their open-source Linux driver stack was updated this past week...

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.3 is out this morning as the latest snapshot of the official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their shared platform driver sources...

Jolla's Sailfish OS 4.0.1 was released this past week to early access subscribers as a major milestone for Sailfish OS 4...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver originally developed as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics on Linux while now supported by the likes of Google and Qualcomm's Code Aurora engineers has some notable changes in store for the next Linux kernel cycle...

For those looking for something more interesting than the Super Bowl today, the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

More than a decade ago Intel was very excited about MIDs as "Mobile Internet Devices" with their early Menlow and Moorestown platforms. Intel's MID plays ultimately were unsuccessful in the long-term and the MID functionality ultimately evolved into smartphones and tablets. In 2021, the Intel MID support is being gutted from the Linux kernel...

While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM...

With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates...

Dropping a conditional (if) statement from the RADV driver in Mesa is helping the performance of discrete Radeon graphics cards with the RADV Vulkan driver for some games...

In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release, Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8...

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1...

Debian 10.8 as the Linux distribution's latest quarterly update is now available ahead of Debian 11 expected later in the year...

LibreSOC remains the very ambitious project of creating a fully open-source hybrid CPU/GPU SoC but with a very uphill battle still in front of them...

Security researchers out of the University of Birmingham have crafted another attack against Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) when having physical motherboard access and using their "VoltPillager" hardware device they assembled for about $30 USD...

The seL4 micro-kernel that has been in development for over a decade saw the creation of the seL4 Foundation last year to further the project's goals. In 2020 the seL4 micro-kernel also added RISC-V as one of its primary CPU architectures...

While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!..

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend...

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September...