Phoronix

AMD earlier this week quietly published a new version of its AOCC code compiler that is now rebased against the upstream LLVM/Clang 12.0 compiler state...

With the Linux 5.12 kernel bringing support for building the kernel with link-time optimizations (LTO) when using the LLVM Clang compiler, here are some benchmarks looking at that performance impact as well as more generally seeing how the LLVM Clang compiler performance is looking when building the Linux kernel relative to GCC.

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver in Gallium3D as well as the Lavapipe Vulkan software implementation now have anisotropic texture filtering support with Mesa 21.3 development code...

Amazon's DAMON is looking like it might be near for mainlining into the Linux kernel for this "Data Access Monitor". One of the follow-up patches that builds off DAMON that is also being pursued by Amazon engineers for proactive reclamation of memory pages...

Oracle has published a new version of GraalVM, its open-source Java JVM/JDK implemented in Java that also supports other programming languages and execution modes. GraalVM continues to be quite an interesting effort given its various languages supported and interesting technical experiments/features in the name of greater Java performance and other innovative features...

A new release of PipeWire was made on Tuesday for this audio/video stream management solution for Linux that can replace the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

Google today released Chrome 92 as their newest release on the browser's four-week release regiment...

The Wine project usually puts out new open-source development releases reliably every other week, but as is sometimes the case during the summer months, last Friday's was missed due to summer holidays. That update -- Wine 6.13 -- has now shipped today...

The Panfrost open-source Linux graphics driver stack has matured nicely for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost generations but for the past two years now there has been Valhall as the latest-generation Arm Mali microarchitecture. There is now work underway on reverse-engineering Valhall for ultimately wiring up with open-source graphics driver support...

AMD posted a new patch series bringing up a new graphics processor, Cyan Skillfish...

DXVK-NVAPI as the effort for exposing more NVIDIA driver/GPU features within DXVK for Steam Play (Proton) usage is out with a new feature release...

The Gentoo project has announced the availability of a greater selection of stage files for download in kicking off the Gentoo Linux installation process...

NVIDIA today is making available a much faster version of TensorRT, its SDK for optimized deep learning inference on their GPUs...

Vulkan 1.2.185 was christened this morning with several new extensions being introduced...

The newest special interest group (SIG) approved by the CentOS Board of Directors is around the automotive space for in-vehicle automotive use-cases...

The folks working on KDE's mobile efforts have released Plasma Mobile 21.07 as the newest feature release...

While Fedora 34 successfully shipped with PipeWire for managing audio/video streams and replacing PulseAudio use-cases, with Fedora 35 this autumn the integration around PipeWire should be even better...

The GNOME project is out today with their first alpha release of the forthcoming GNOME 41 desktop environment...

FreeType 2.11 is out as the newest version of this widely-used library for font rasterization...

It looks like NVIDIA could be feeling the pressure from AMD's GPUOpen efforts with NVIDIA now publishing more GameWorks projects as open-source for both Linux and Windows...

In addition to showcasing NVIDIA RTX support on Arm, NVIDIA also used this first day of GDC week to release their 470.57.02 stable Linux driver as well as official DLSS SDK support for Linux...

Most Linux distributions including the likes of Ubuntu and Fedora have been shipping Intel's Thermald daemon the past few years as it's important to achieving good thermal/power behavior on modern Intel SoCs. For those curious about its impact, here are some benchmarks carried out with Intel Thermald or not when using an Intel Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake notebook.

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...