Phoronix

From Linux 5.11 adventures to the AMD CES keynote to many open-source software advancements, there was a lot of activity during the month of January to take one's mind off the pandemic...

Linux 5.11-rc6 is out ahead of the stable release of Linux 5.11 coming in February...

Taiwins debuted last year as a compact Wayland compositor and focused on being modular with Wayland scripting support. Up to now Taiwins relied upon the WLROOTS effort born out of the Sway project for doing much of the Wayland heavy-lifting but the developer has now replaced it with its own Wayland support library...

Immediately following the CXL 2.0 specification being made public in November, Intel developers began posting Linux enablement patches for CXL 2.0 with an initial focus on type-3 memory device support. It's looking like that CXL 2.0 enablement work is now closer to being mainlined in the Linux kernel...

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák continues squeezing Mesa for every bit of possible performance, which in recent months has been with a seemingly workstation focus...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.1 as the first development snapshot of the new series, Wine-Staging is out this morning with an updated release...

While it's sign-up time for open-source organizations hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2021 changes in the name of the pandemic are leading some organizations to debate whether it's still being involved with this student coding effort...

Bareflank is an open-source Linux hypervisor in development for several years and written around modern C++11/C++14 code and other modern functionality compared to longstanding virtualization hypervisors. Over the past few years it's been picking up many new features while this week Bareflank 2.1 released prior to a major overhaul coming with Bareflank 3.0 that will radically change the codebase...

Last year the Linux kernel began tightening up the ability to write to select CPU MSRs from user-space. That restricting of user-space access to select registers was done in the name of security as well as not wanting user-space to accidentally or maliciously poke some MSRs that could cause problems with kernel behavior. Now in kernel space there are some yet-to-be-merged patches that would place some new restrictions on kernel modules around poking certain registers or using select CPU instructions...

While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned...

Added to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) last year was an integrated static analyzer via the "-fanalyzer" option for spotting potential code issues. For GCC 10 this integrated static analyzer operating off GCC's GIMPLE was in good shape for catching various bugs while for the upcoming GCC 11 it is now much more capable...

The Linux-friendly folks at OnLogic (nee Logic Supply) have launched a line of fanless, industrial-grade computers powered by Intel's Elkhart Lake...

As part of work on GNOME 40, the GNOME Shell is seeing some big refinements like shifting of its workspaces to be horizontally laid out, which has now been merged...

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features...

For those continuing to rely on SATA 3.0 storage, last week Samsung introduced the 870 EVO as their latest solid-state drive in the very successful EVO line-up. For those curious about the Linux performance of the Samsung 870 EVO or wanting to run your own side-by-side benchmarks against the data in this article, here is a review looking at the Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SSD.

Following the release of Wine 6.0 stable earlier this month, Wine 6.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development snapshot that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 7.0 stable release next year...

While most Linux users likely don't get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it's pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward...

While Intel's large open-source Linux graphics driver team has been pushing a lot of code over the past number of months for bringing up their DG1 graphics and other current/forthcoming discrete graphics offerings, one area that is still in its infancy is around the multi-device handling. At least from the compute side, there is some recent progress being made for multi-device support...

On top of aiming to use Wayland by default, another high profile change being worked on for this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is using link-time optimizations (LTO) for all 64-bit package builds...

For those Linux gamers and other desktop users of the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with some extra time this weekend, Mesa 21.0-RC3 is now available for testing as what might be the last release candidate before officially releasing Mesa 21.0 as soon as next week...

Following NVIDIA RTX 30 open-source mode-setting support in Linux 5.11, the batch of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.12 kernel have now been submitted to DRM-Next...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 released near the beginning of the month with various "RDNA 2" optimizations while now AMDVLK 2021.Q1.2 is out in closing out the month and bringing more Big Navi optimizations...

Plans are moving forward for providing standalone XWayland packages that would ship the latest XWayland code for allowing X11 clients within Wayland environments, separate from X.Org Server releases as has been the bundling case to date...

Following last week's release of Google Chrome 88, the Chrome 89 beta is now available for testing...

For those looking at setting up a water-cooled rackmount server either for running high-end hardware like the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO hardware or just wanting a minimal noise environment for your studio or other environment, the SilverStone RM42-502 is a 4U rackmount chassis that can handle SSI-EEB motherboards and still provide enough room for supporting up to 240mm liquid cooling radiators. We've been testing out the SilverStone RM42-502 to great success for the past month in conjunction with the SilverStone IceGem 240P AIO water cooling setup.

Intel's open-source driver developers have begun posting patches for bringing up "Display13" as their next-gen display IP that looks like it will be introduced after the upcoming Rocket Lake / Alder Lake / DG1 platforms...

Just last week I wrote about Itanium IA-64 support in Linux kernel being broken for a month during the Linux 5.11 kernel cycle. That was fixed but since then another regression came to light that had been affecting all IA-64 hardware since a patch was merged back in October. A fix for that latest regression has landed while in the process now marking the Itanium architecture as orphaned...

Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release...

If changes around pfSense land have you looking at other possible open-source firewall/router options, OPNsense that forked from pfSense six years ago is out with its newest feature release...

Following the LLVM 12 code branching earlier this week, the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 12.0 is now available for testing...

GNU Parted 3.4 is out as the first update to this open-source partition editor in sixteen months...

With Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm becoming quite popular and well supported across many different environments -- including support for Zstd compressing the Linux kernel, among other uses -- there is a renewed effort in allowing Linux firmware to be compressed via Zstd...

For those that have been trying to find a desktop-friendly BSD operating system that works smoothly out of the box but haven't yet found the perfect match, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 is now available for improving this desktop-minded FreeBSD-derived open-source operating system...

Wayland 1.18 released back in February 2020 while now nearly one year later it's been succeeded by Wayland 1.19...

IO_uring continues to be one of the most exciting technical innovations in the Linux kernel in recent years not only for more performant I/O but also opening up other doors for new Linux innovations. IO_uring has continued adding features since being mainlined in 2019 and now the newest proposed feature is the ability to build new ioctls / kernel interfaces atop IO_uring...

With a pending patch, the Linux 5.11 AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 performance is looking very good as far as the out-of-the-box performance is concerned when using Schedutil as is becoming the increasingly default CPU frequency scaling governor on more distributions / default kernels. With the previously noted Linux 5.11 regression addressed from when the AMD CPU frequency invariance support was first introduced, the Schedutil performance from small Ryzen systems up through big EPYC hardware is looking quite good. But how much upside is left in relation to the optimal CPU frequency scaling performance with the "performance" governor? Here is a look at those benchmarks on Ryzen and EPYC for Schedutil vs. Performance on a patched Linux 5.11 kernel.

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...