Phoronix

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...

Over the past year there has been much chatter about Enterprise Linux Next within the Fedora camp and now this special interest group (SIG) is finally getting underway...

Now with the CPUFreq fix landing this week in Linux Git, the mainline Linux 5.11 kernel in its near final state is looking in very good shape for AMD Zen 2/3 hardware from Ryzen laptops and desktops through EPYC servers. The Linux 5.11 development kernel was regressed for the better part of the past two months but now that the frequency invariance regression is addressed, not only is the regression gone but generally is performing much better compared to prior kernel versions.

Linux 5.11 stable is expected to be released on Sunday barring any second thoughts by Linus Torvalds that could lead to an eighth weekly release candidate that would in turn push the official release back by one week. In any case, Linux 5.11 will be formally out soon and it's an exciting one on the feature front...

With Linux 5.11 there is open-source Nouveau KMS support for Ampere GPUs -- just kernel mode-setting without any form of 3D acceleration. The actual hardware acceleration requires more work and also NVIDIA to release the necessary signed firmware binaries. With Linux 5.12 there still is no 3D acceleration but a big set of patches was merged as a step in that direction...

OBS Studio, the cross-platform open-source solution for live streaming and screen recording, has landed the last major piece of its effort to natively support Wayland...

For as rough of a year as 2020 was, one of the many open-source accomplishments was Sony taking up "official" maintenance of their HID driver and ahead of Christmas to much surprise they published an official PlayStation 5 DualSense open-source controller driver for Linux. That PS5 controller driver is now set to be introduced with the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window...

Among Intel's many open-source software accomplishments for 2020 was introducing OSPray Studio as part of oneAPI. OSPray Studio builds atop the existing OSPray ray-tracing engine and inter-connected oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components to offer an open-source scene graph application for interactive visualizations and ray-tracing based rendering. The newest OSPray Studio is now available...

It was just yesterday we were talking about Zink achieving OpenGL 4.3 support and wondering if OpenGL 4.4 or potentially even 4.5 could be buttoned up in time for Mesa 21.1... Well, as of a few minutes ago Zink now is advertising OpenGL 4.5 support for this graphics API layer built atop Vulkan...

With this spring marking two years already since Intel introduced the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors plus with Ice Lake Xeon processors being on the horizon, here is a look at how the flagship Xeon Platinum 8280 2P performance has evolved atop open-source Linux during that duration. The benchmarks today are looking at the performance of Ubuntu 19.04 for that of roughly the shape the Linux performance/optimizations were at launch and then the performance today if moving to the in-development Ubuntu 21.04 and also shifting to the latest Linux 5.11 kernel and GCC 11 code compiler.

It looks like thanks to AMD's increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is hiring more Linux engineers. AMD currently has several interesting job openings on the Linux front...

Mir, Canonical's Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes...

Back in September I wrote about Intel developers posting Linux enablement patches for their Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 PCIe accelerator for hardware-based load balancing functionality. That work hasn't yet been upstreamed but recently marked its tenth revision to the "DLB 2.0" patches...

Mesa's LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6...

The Mercurial distributed revision control system continues to see use particularly around some large code-base projects and the developers continue working to optimize its performance in part by transitioning more of it to the Rust programming language...

The USB4 / Thunderbolt changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window have been queued into the USB-next tree...

For months System76 has been teasing that they were getting into prototyping and manufacturing their own keyboards. This moves follows them manufacturing their own cases with the beautifully engineered Thelio line-up while now it looks like they are ready to go public with details on the System76 keyboard...

Just in time for the expected Linux 5.11 stable release on Sunday, the AMD frequency invariance performance regression I've been noting and writing about since Christmas day has been resolved with the previously covered fix having been merged today...

The official release of FreeBSD 13.0 is coming up in March, while already from our preliminary tests of the newly minted FreeBSD 13.0 BETA1, the benchmark results are extremely tantalizing compared to FreeBSD 12.2... Ultimately the performance should be much more competitive now compared to Linux (at least on Intel x86_64) and other operating systems with the big FreeBSD 13 release.

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020, having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors...

Announced nearly three years ago by Intel was the ACRN reference hypervisor framework intended for IoT/embedded use-cases with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing. More of the kernel bits to this "Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development" are set to see mainline with the imminent Linux 5.12 kernel cycle...

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly...