Phoronix

David Sterba on Tuesday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel, which once again include more performance optimizations and notable new features...

For those either needing a well-built, fanless computer that can run fine as a Linux desktop or are looking for an industrial-rated edge computing system, the Helix 500 is an interesting product from OnLogic (formerly, Logic Supply) that fills the space for a dependable, petite PC and ships with Windows, Linux, or even no OS at all if just preferring to load your own operating system of choice.

XWayland 21.1 is moving forward as a standalone XWayland release separated from the X.Org Server. Given that X.Org Server 1.21 isn't moving toward release with no one stepping up to oversee that long overdue update, Red Hat engineers have devised the plan for standalone XWayland releases that are separated from the rest of the xorg-server code-base to at least get the updated X11 client on Wayland support out to users...

Ingo Molnar sent in the scheduler updates for Linux 5.12 today and it includes some notable additions, including PREEMPT_DYNAMIC, which allows changing the kernel's preemption mode at boot/run-time...

The open-source, cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.2 is out today as the newest version of our automated, production-ready benchmarking software framework...

Intel on Tuesday night released the "microcode-20210216" package as the latest update to their collection of CPU microcode binaries. This time around the only changes to the Intel CPU microcode binaries are for Skylake server CPUs and Cascade Lake B-0/B-1 processors in order to address two vulnerabilities that came to light last year...

LLVM 11.1.0 has been tagged as a special release to deal with ABI breakage on LLVM 11.0...

The pull request is pending that would allow Clang Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) to be enabled when building the Linux 5.12 kernel with this alternative compiler. The initial pull request has the compiler optimization work ready for the core infrastructure and 64-bit ARM (AArch64) while the x86_64 support isn't expected until the Linux 5.13 cycle...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved plans for "Fedora Kinoite" as the newest spin to debut this autumn alongside Fedora 35...

Last year was the interesting remarks by Microsoft that they want to "create a complete virtualization stack with Linux." The latest fruits of that are set to land with the Linux 5.12 kernel...

Out today is a new release of Intel's open-source oneDNN library used as a deep neural network library for assembling deep learning applications. With the new oneDNN 2.1 release there is now initial support for NVIDIA GPU acceleration as well as a host of improvements for running on forthcoming Intel CPUs...

Last week when conducting preliminary benchmarks of the new FreeBSD 13 operating system beta we found broad and significant performance improvements on Intel hardware but how is this popular BSD operating system performing for AMD EPYC? Here are some initial performance tests looking at FreeBSD 12.2 stable to FreeBSD 13 beta on an AMD EPYC 7F52 server.

Today marks five years since the announcement of Vulkan 1.0. Over the past five years we have seen incredible adoption of this high performance graphics API across multiple platforms, open-source Vulkan drivers that are kept up to date well with the latest spec revisions, exciting new extensions, and the spec continues to receive new extensions and revisions on an almost bi-weekly basis...

Found with mobile Intel CPUs across Tiger Lake, Ice Lake, and even Cannon Lake has been the Intel GNA accelerator. This Gaussian and Neural Accelerator is also found with Intel Gemini Lake processors and various development kits. The Intel GNA has been backed by an out-of-tree Linux driver while now the company is finally working to upstream their GNA support in the Linux kernel...

Linux 5.12 pull requests continue coming in for the newly-opened merge window that in turn should see its stable release in late April...

The KDE community today released Plasma 5.21 as the latest major release of this open-source desktop...

Just two months after the release of Qt 6.0, given the quicker release cycle this year, Qt 6.1 Alpha is already available that follows the feature freeze that began earlier this month...

While Slackware carries the badge of being the oldest still maintained Linux distribution, it doesn't see new releases too often and doesn't carry the popularity it once did. In any case, Slackware 15.0 is being prepared as the next release...

On Monday the crypto subsystem updates were sent in to the Linux 5.12 kernel by crypto maintainer Herbert Xu...

Mike Blumenkrantz continues to be on a mad roll when it comes to getting all of the Zink patches upstreamed into mainline Mesa... This Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan translation layer now has OpenGL 4.6 turned on for Mesa 21.1!..

OProfile as a system profiler for Linux systems was started twenty years ago during the Linux 2.4 kernel days. While the user-space components are still going strong, the kernel-side support is redundant in an era of the perf subsystem and thus slated for removal with Linux 5.12...

The "platform-drivers-x86" area of the kernel that is primarily made up of driver support around Intel/AMD laptops and other platform drivers is seeing a number of noteworthy additions for the newly-opened Linux 5.12 merge window...

Monado, the leading open-source project implementing The Khronos Group's OpenXR specification for AR/VR devices, is now officially considered a conformant implementation and is marked by its v21.0 release...

Even before the Linux 5.11 kernel was released on Sunday, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) maintainer Paolo Bonzini already had submitted early the initial batch of virtualization changes for Linux 5.12. There are some interesting changes on the KVM front for Linux 5.12...

It's approaching one year since the proposal of FUTEX2 for addressing shortcomings of the existing FUTEX system call and allowing the semantics to better match that of the Windows behavior, which is of use when running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play's Wine/Proton. In the end the FUTEX2 system call can lead to lower CPU utilization and in turn allowing for greater Linux gaming performance...

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.11 kernel, the GNU folks have put out their "GNU Linux-libre 5.11-gnu" kernel that removes support for loading closed-source kernel modules, stripping out drivers/functionality that are dependent upon closed-source microcode/firmware, and other sanitization work in the name of maintaining a fully free software system...

It's already been six years since the initial pre-alpha release of Devuan, the fork of Debian that aims to provide Debian without systemd and focus on init system independence. For marking the Valentine's Day occasion, developers released Devuan 3.1...

Earlier this month Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux developers posted their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple M1 ARM SoC platform for the mainline kernel with devices like the 2020 Mac Mini / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air devices. The second iteration of those Apple M1 Linux patches have now been posted...

Heading out of Valentine's weekend, there is a new Vulkan specification update with a notable new extension...

Due to an unfortunate misalignment of the Ryzen 5000 series launch and the Linux kernel cycles, CPU temperature monitoring for Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) desktop CPUs isn't landing until now with the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle...

The Dark Mod that began as a total conversion mod for Doom 3 but evolved into a standalone game making use of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine is out with a big update. This is one of the few open-source games making use of the public id Tech 4 code-base and with today's v2.09 update is a large rewrite to its graphics back-end...

Made public last year was the Arm Straight Light Speculation (SLS) vulnerability. SLS with ARM hardware can result in speculative executing instructions following an unconditional change in control flow. The Linux kernel may soon have an option for enabling the mitigation of the Arm SLS vulnerability...

What better way for open-source enthusiasts to celebrate Valentine's Day than with the stable release of the Linux 5.11 kernel... Linus Torvalds even changed the kernel codename for the occasion to being the "Valentine's Day Edition" kernel...

Among Facebook employees while they are mostly using Windows and macOS on their laptops/desktops, for those using Linux the primary choice has shifted from Ubuntu to Fedora but they have begun ramping up CentOS Stream too...

The open-source Linux graphics driver support for the Ryzen 5000 series mobile hardware has been developed under the "Green Sardine" codename. With the soon-to-be-stable Linux 5.11 kernel offering the initial enablement for the new hardware and Ryzen 5000 series laptops expected this quarter, the Green Sardine firmware blobs have landed in linux-firmware.git...

Linux 5.11 should be released today as stable but we'll see if 5.11-rc8 is decided instead given there has been an uptick in last minute changes for this kernel. This will mean either the Linux 5.12 merge window is kicking off at the end of today or could be pushed back by one week, but in whatever case there are many changes that have been queuing up for this next kernel version window...

It's been eighteen years since the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was released while thanks to the it becoming open-source along with the id Tech 3 engine, it's still being advanced by the open-source community in 2021...

Going back to last year there has been work by AMD engineers on an experimental FreeSync video mode optimization to avoid screen blanking around full-screen video playback. Basically avoiding an entire mode-set when changing the timing mode during video playback to bypass any screen flickering/blanking. That work has now been updated to its sixth spin while it's being viewed as a temporary measure until a better solution can be devised...

Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor that is the Rust-based virtualization hypervisor focused for cloud environments is out with its newest open-source release...

There has been a lot of attention on helloSystem this week as a macOS-inspired operating system built atop FreeBSD with an emphasis on providing a polished desktop experience. Since we highlighting the FOSDEM presentation about it, there has been a lot of coverage on helloSystem and this weekend marks a new experimental ISO release...

IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent times. IO_uring for more efficient asynchronous I/O has continued getting faster and introducing new features over the past two years and for the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle will be even faster...

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is now under its soft freeze, one month after starting its build-essentials freeze...

Following last weekend's release of FreeBSD 13 BETA1, the second beta is now available for testing this big BSD operating system update...

Ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window expected to open at end of day tomorrow, assuming Linux 5.11 is out on schedule, there is already a pending pull request with a big feature addition: IDMAPPED mounts...

Two weeks ago with Wine-Staging 6.1 it was at nearly 800 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base while for Wine-Staging 6.2 it has fallen to just a 669 patch difference...

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development...

An informal case study suggests that since Debian enacted its Code of Conduct and began participating in the Outreachy internship program hasn't helped in increasing female participation within the open-source project but is actually trending lower compared to the early years of this original GNU/Linux distribution...

One year after OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 released, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is now available. Continuing to make OpenMandriva Lx rather unique among Linux distributions is its use of the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC. Another unique "selling point" of OpenMandriva is its AMD Zen optimized version where the entire package set is rebuilt with Zen optimizations...

Proton 5.13-6 is out in time for the weekend Linux gamer in providing the latest functionality for this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

What better way to celebrate Valentine's Day weekend with some wine... Wine 6.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for running Windows games and applications on Linux/macOS...