Phoronix

Following the emergency Linux 5.12-rc2 kernel release nine days ago, the Linux 5.12-rc3 is out today as a more pleasant release candidate that is back on the usual Sunday release regiment...

This week marked Intel sending out initial Linux driver enablement patches for Alder Lake P mobile support to complement the existing Alder Lake S desktop support that has been coming together in recent months. In addition to the Linux kernel code for ADL-P, the Intel open-source Media Driver code was also updated for video acceleration on this Intel hybrid chip...

In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games, this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games...

GRVK is the open-source project implementing AMD's Mantle API on Vulkan. Mantle was the precursor to the Vulkan industry standard and while it's no longer in use by AMD, there still are some games out there that allow making use of it...

Now that Clang LTO support was merged into Linux 5.12 for x86_64 and ARM64, Google engineers have sent out their patches enabling Clang Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for the Linux kernel...

Google engineer Yu Zhao sent out patches proposing a "multigenerational LRU" implementation for the Linux kernel's least recently used (LRU) handling for memory page replacement...

If all goes well FreeBSD 13.0 will be officially released before the end of the month while out this weekend is the second release candidate for testing...

Per reader requests, several software-defined radio (SDR) benchmarks have been added alongside the 640+ other distinct workloads available for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution...

GRUB 2.06 was originally anticipated for release in 2020 but then the BootHole security vulnerability foiled those plans. This long awaited bootloader update though is near with GRUB 2.06-RC1 being issued on Friday and plans to formally release it in about one month's time...

Binomial's Basis Universal GPU texture codec for highly-compressed textures is now even faster when ETC1S encoding to this intermediate format...

Wine 6.4 is out today as the newest bi-weekly point release for running your favorite Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

Google has published their proof-of-concept code showing the practicality of Spectre exploits within modern web browsers' JavaScript engines. The code is out there and you can even try it for yourself on the leaky.page web-site...

Another feature tacked onto the big GNOME 40 desktop update is a headless native back-end for Mutter and the ability to easily create virtual monitors...

With GCC 11 stable likely to be released next month, here is the latest in our compiler testing against the current GCC 10 stable release. This round of tests was carried out on a System76 Thelio Major with Ryzen Threadripper 3990X HEDT processor.

Following last week's Chrome 89 release, Chrome 90 is now available in beta form...

In addition to yesterday marking the release of Mesa 21.0 that includes the likes of the RADV driver, today AMD released AMDVLK 2021.Q1.5 as their latest official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their cross-platform driver sources...

While there has been 7-Zip file support on Linux via the p7zip project, the upstream 7-Zip 21.01 Alpha release has finally introduced native Linux support...

It looks like the official release of systemd 248 is quite imminent but for now a third release candidate has been issued to help facilitate last minute testing...

Following several weeks of delays, Mesa 21.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature update for this collection of predominantly open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems...

While for months already Intel has been volleying Linux driver patches around Alder Lake S, today they began publishing their graphics driver support patches for Alder Lake P...

Valve continues to be making exciting progress in the realm of Steam Play for improving the experience of running Windows games on Linux...

System76 today introduced the Thelio Mira as their nwest desktop computer offering that is sized between the Thelio and Thelio Major while still packing quite a bit of compute potential...

Intel sent out their latest open-source Linux driver patches today for their new "XE_LPD" display architecture that will be found with upcoming hardware platforms. XE_LPD features "version 13" display capabilities but not to be confused with "Gen13" graphics as they are beginning to more segregate their different Intel GPU IP blocks...

Recently working on some fresh tests using the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver stack against the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver code in its newest form, here are some fresh benchmarks for this latest round of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming tests.

GitLab is following the same approach of GitHub and others in now using "main" as the default branch name for new Git repositories...

Last week Intel wired up Gallium3D threaded context support to their "Iris" OpenGL driver for yielding some sizable performance improvements. Now the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has hooked into the threaded context support as well...

An editor's draft for post-Spectre web development guidance was made available by the W3C...

LLVM 12.0 was aiming for release at the start of March but it missed that goal post and a third release candidate was tagged on Wednesday. But, fortunately, it looks like the official release will be out soon...

The Mesa release train once again rode off the tracks but this week looks like it will get back on track with hopes of releasing Mesa 21.0 on Thursday...

The AMD Radeon "Aldebaran" successor to Arcturus has now landed the initial user-space code into Mesa 21.1...

AMD recently added a notice to the ROCm repository reinforcing their focus on headless, non-GUI workloads while now that statement is being sort of retracted and they have clarified their support intentions around this open-source Radeon Open eCosystem driver stack...

Security researcher and Microsoft engineer Mickaël Salaün is proposing unprivileged chroot support for the Linux kernel...

With that nasty swapfile issue behind us, the Linux 5.12 kernel is looking to be in good shape and on my tests so far across a number of different Intel and AMD systems I am not seeing any major surprises...

Google has announced the 202 open-source projects that will be included as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative for getting students involved in free software development...

Back in 2019 we reported on Intel bringing up a new SoC dubbed "Lighting Mountain" to be used as a network processor and for other use-cases. Intel brought up that initial Linux kernel code for Lightning Mountain in 2019 but since then the code has already begun to fall into disrepair while it looks like it was either punted off as part of MaxLinear's acquisition last year of the Intel Home Gateway Platform Division or otherwise as a result of that was cancelled...

Chinese MIPS64 vendor Loongson announced the 2K1000 back in 2017 and while it has already been succeeded by more advanced chips in the Loongson 3 series, the Linux driver support for the 2K1000 is still coming together...

The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring...

We are already quite eager for NVIDIA's 470 series Linux driver due to Wayland / DMA-BUF improvements coming to this next major feature release for their proprietary driver stack. Making it all the more exciting is it looks like the NVIDIA 470 series driver will have OpenCL 3.0 support...

OpenZFS 2.0.4 is out as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Disclosed today is CVE-2021-21300 as a security vulnerability affecting git clone that could lead to specially crafted repositories being able to execute code during the Git clone process...

Given the beta phase of openSUSE Leap 15.3 having started earlier this month, here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at the performance for openSUSE Leap 15.3 with the initial beta snapshot against Leap 15.2 with all stable release updates against the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.

While Fedora 34 will be out around the end of next month, there are already change proposals being filed for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn. One of those early changes for that next release cycle is referring to the OS as "Fedora Linux" within its OS release information...

Arch Linux developers are considering some default enhancements to their Linux distribution that would increase the out-of-the-box performance...

Sylvestre Ledru who is a director at Mozilla by day while also being prolific to Debian/Ubuntu and LLVM/Clang development has managed to get a Rust version of Coreutils packaged and running well enough on Debian...

Just two days after the release of Linux 5.11.4 it has now been succeeded by Linux 5.11.5 and the maintained LTS kernels also saw new releases this morning...

Intel engineers have been working on a tool called kcpuid for showing the raw CPU features/capabilities of a processor under Linux. This utility will be part of the kernel source tree and is queued up now in tip's x86/misc branch, thereby making it material for Linux 5.13 barring any issues coming up...

If it wasn't odd enough during these pandemic times seeing Nintendo 64 support upstreamed into the Linux 5.12 kernel a few weeks back, the latest vintage hardware seeing open-source support still going on is the Motorola 68000 series 32-bit processors. LLVM/Clang today merged the "m68k" target for these three decade old processors...

While Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors are launching this month, Intel's open-source Linux driver developers known for their punctual support are already preparing early code around their 14th Gen "Lunar Lake" platform...

The patch series implementing support for Wayland's Presentation-Time protocol within the Mutter compositor has been merged ahead of this month's GNOME 40 release...