Phoronix

Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver...

Fedora 34 Beta is out today as the march is on towards this latest installment of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Published back in January was the initial work on a HMM-based SVM memory manager for the open-source Radeon compute stack. A second version of that work is now available as it continues working towards the mainline kernel...

Excitement is building around initial support for the Rust language within the Linux kernel that arrived in Linux-Next and is now seeing more developer interest...

They are a bit late in doing so, but Ubuntu developers are working to figure out if it makes sense to run FSCK "file-system check" at boot time. It turns out Ubuntu Server and other Ubuntu installations making use of their Curtin installation component haven't enabled the functionality for FSCK at boot but now they are (re)visiting the matter...

Shells.com is a "personal cloud computer" that makes it possible to have a remote secure desktop from the browser whether it be running on a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, or other device. They have been supporting a number of different Linux distributions while more continue to be on the way...

With Mesa 21.0 released earlier this month following a one month delay, the Mesa 21.1 release calendar has now been published for that next quarterly feature release...

It's been proposed in the past but never acted upon yet but the idea of dropping/retiring Mesa's "classic" OpenGL drivers from the mainline code-base and letting them potentially live on in an "LTS" branch has once again been brought up...

With some Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards sporting a USB-C interface for USB-C monitors or VR headsets, AMD has been working on the open-source Linux driver support for this interface...

In addition to the last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" tuning in GCC 11, also landing rather late are scheduling updates for the GNU Compiler Collection around the IBM POWER10 processor target...

Announced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt FPGA Soft CPU Core. OpenPOWER's Microwatt is a VHDL-based design for an open-source POWER ISA processor. core. The Microwatt is a basic 64-bit POWER core that can be run for software simulations or on FPGA hardware. But now Microwatt will actually see chip fabrication thanks to a program sponsored by Google...

Of the many possible areas for advancing Linux and open-source, the latest project being embraced by the Linux Foundation is Liquid Prep for helping farmers water their crops. It's a noble cause but not too Linux centered unless talking about cloud resources...

One week ago AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors while this morning Intel has made public when they will be formally introducing their 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors...

Following last week's release of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and Radeon Software for Linux 20.50, the new "Navy Flounder" microcode required for this GPU to function with the open-source AMDGPU Linux driver stack has been published...

It's looking like the Linux 5.13 kernel will better support some Thrustmaster wheels due to new driver code providing for proper USB device initialization...

Vulkan 1.2.173 is out this morning as the latest revision to this high performance graphics/compute API...

FreeCAD 0.19 was released this weekend as the newest major feature release for this respected open-source CAD solution / parametric 3D modeling solution...

The fourth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.12 is now available for testing ahead of its anticipated stable release next month...

While Razer has talked up Linux support in the past, so far they have not officially offered Linux support for their range of wares popular with gamers. However, thanks to the open-source community there has been the likes of OpenRazer offering up support for the company's keyboards, mice, and other peripherals under Linux thanks to reverse engineering. Today marks the release of OpenRazer 3.0 for furthering this effort...

In addition to the legacy IDE driver code ready to go from the mainline Linux kernel, receiving its final death sentence now is also the WiMAX support...

It's been three years that Retpolines (return trampolines) have been around as part of the Spectre defenses on Linux and kernel developers in particular are still working to better optimize different areas of their code to deal with the performance overhead incurred...

For users of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, it's been a very active past week...

Patches have been proposed for the GCC compiler to ultimately allow MinGW Windows executables to be debugged with Microsoft's debuggers...

This week marked the arrival of Qt 6.1 Beta 2 for providing the latest bug fixes for this cross-platform toolkit ahead of the planned release next month...

A third and final release candidate of FreeBSD 13.0 was warranted ahead of its formal 13.0-RELEASE later this month...

Ubuntu 21.04 is moving ahead with plans to enable compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for package builds in the name of greater performance...

AMD on Friday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.13 merge window...

This past week Debian 11 "Bullseye" embarked on its hard freeze in gearing up for release later this year...

As we get ready for spring, KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support for the Plasma 5.22 cycle...

It's 2021 and proposed patches by upstream developers would finally remove Linux's legacy IDE driver code...

For a long while now Linux kernel developers have discusses the prospects of optionally allowing the Rust language to be used for new device drivers within the Linux kernel areas and other areas within the kernel for this language that prides itself on safety and performance. As the first baby step towards that dream, initial Rust support appeared this week in the Linux-Next tree...

Recently Ubuntu maker Canonical committed to using Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit as its "default choice" for their mobile and desktop applications moving forward. There is now an Ubuntu Blog post further detailing their interests in Flutter...

The release candidate of GNOME 40 is available today while the official GNOME 40.0 debut is still on track for next week...

Following yesterday's release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and the updated Radeon Software for Linux 20.50 driver, AMD has now released AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 as their updated open-source Vulkan driver with Navi 22 / RX 6700 XT support...

While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver...

It looks like the Linux 5.13 kernel will be supporting an interesting RISC-V feature this spring...

It's been a while since hearing much about Wayland efforts on FreeBSD, but it turns out the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor can run on this BSD after a number of setup steps. However, the likes of KDE Plasma on Wayland still aren't working well outside of Linux...

While NZXT does not provide any official Linux software support for their products like their all-in-one liquid coolers, the open-source community for years has worked to fill that void thanks to reverse-engineering. The latest work when it comes to the NZXT Kraken AIO liquid coolers is a proposed HWMON driver for the mainline kernel...

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan...

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards having gone up for sale today (albeit in incredibly short supply), AMD published an updated Radeon Software for Linux driver comprising its AMDGPU-PRO and AMDGPU-Open driver stacks with support for this new Navi RDNA2 graphics card...

For those looking at Arch Linux powered distributions that provide a quick and easy desktop experience, Manjaro 21.0-rc1 is out today as the newest test release for this popular option...

While we are very eager to see the NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver for at least having Wayland / DMA-BUF support improvements and OpenCL 3.0 support, for now the NVIDIA 460 series is the latest public stable series and today was updated to v460.67...

On Monday, the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch day, we finally got to see some serious tuning begin for the Zen 3 "Znver3" CPU target in the GCC compiler after that initial code landed at the end of last year. Yesterday a second Zen 3 tuning patch was published and then today a third tuning patch has made it out...

This week alongside the EPYC 7003 series launch was the introduction of AOCC 3.0 as AMD's Zen-optimized LLVM/Clang downstream. We have started putting this updated compiler through its paces to see what it means for AMD Zen 3 performance.

Samsung for some time now has been working on an in-kernel SMB3 protocol implementation for file sharing across the network with "CIFSD" and it's now been queued into Linux-Next meaning it will likely go for mainline in a coming cycle...

Google has released libaom 3.0.0-rc1 as the AOMedia AV1 Codec Library...

As part of planning for Ubuntu 21.04 to use Wayland by default when running on the default GNOME Shell desktop, Ubuntu developers were going to evaluate the standalone XWayland work being pursued by Red Hat initially for Fedora in order to ship newer XWayland code without resorting to releasing a new X.Org Server. That standalone XWayland package is now on its way to the Ubuntu archive...

Just weeks ahead of the GCC 11 stable release we saw Znver3 tuning work out of SUSE for allowing the GNU Compiler Collection to better cater towards the AMD Zen 3 microarchitecture. That tuning work follows the initial patch at the end of last year that introduced "Znver3" and flipped on the new instructions. Now another patch working on the Zen 3 tuning for GCC has been posted and already merged...

OpenBLAS 0.3.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library that continues to work on maximizing the performance for x86_64 and other architectures...

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor...