Phoronix

LibreOffice 7.1 should be released at the start of February while now the second to last release candidate is available for testing of this leading cross-platform, open-source office suite...

Several readers have expressed concerned that Qt open-source downloads have disappeared but The Qt Company has now commented it's only a temporary issue due to a "severe hardware failure" in the cloud...

With the BUS1 in-kernel IPC not panning out and not seeing any major code work in nearly two years, the user-space based, D-Bus compatible DBus-Broker remains the performant and current option for those looking at something faster and more reliable than D-Bus itself...

Oracle on Tuesday released GraalVM 21.0 as the latest version of their Java VM/JDK that also supports other languages and modes of execution...

The domination of the open-source WireGuard secure VPN tunnel not only on Linux systems but BSDs too... WireGuard is now available on pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform...

Google has released Chrome 88 as the latest stable version of their cross-platform web browser...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has unanimously approved several high profile features for the upcoming Fedora 34...

For those wondering how the likes of the XanMod and Liquorix kernel spins are competing these days with the mainline Linux kernel, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at these popular derivatives of the Linux kernel. XanMod in particular atop Ubuntu can easily help squeeze extra performance out of the system as shown by these benchmarks on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop.

Back in 2019 support was added to GNOME 3.34 to allow starting XWayland on-demand. With this opt-in feature, XWayland support would only be started up when needed (on-demand) for running X11 clients. That support has now matured enough where for the upcoming GNOME 40 it will be enabled by default...

With Linux 5.11 came Pioneer DDJ-RR DJ controller support while for Linux 5.12 additional Pioneer DJ equipment will be supported...

The eBPF in-kernel virtual machine that allows for handling sandboxed "programs" within the Linux kernel continues on its stellar upward trajectory...

It's been nearly one year that AMDGPU patches have been around to better handle GPU hot unplugging on Linux. The use-case for that being either removal via sysfs such as if then assigning the GPU to a VM or for external GPUs such as connected via Thunderbolt. Those patches are still baking but the latest iteration of the work has now been published by AMD...

While 2021 may be the year that some desktop Linux distributions begin using PipeWire by default as the next-generation replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK, for upstream PulseAudio this week it's finally seeing better/restored support for FreeBSD. PulseAudio has merged a set of patches long available via FreeBSD Ports and the like to improve the BSD audio experience...

Newer wireless Logitech keyboard/mice supporting "unified battery" reporting will be supported beginning with Linux 5.12 as a newer interface compared to the existing battery reporting support...

SiFive in cooperation with Tynker and BBC Learning have launched a Doctor Who themed HiFive Inventor Coding Kit. This Initial HiFive Inventor Coding Kit is intended to help kids as young as seven years of age get involved with computer programming through a variety of fun exercises and challenges involving the RISC-V powered mini computer and related peripherals like LED lighting and speaker control.

GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions...

While in recent years there has been growing interest in enhancing Linux's Thunderbolt security with offering security levels and other functionality to authorize supported/known Thunderbolt devices, surprisingly it's taken until 2021 to see the ability for Linux's Thunderbolt software connection manage to handle de-authorizing devices...

While Intel formally discontinued the Itanium processors just under two years ago, the Linux software support for IA-64 continues. However, as a possible sign of the times, the Linux 5.11 kernel build for it has been broken the past month...

While there is the prior "ESYNC" and "FSYNC" work pursued by Wine for the Linux kernel, it appears Wine developers are back to the drawing board in coming up with a Linux kernel implementation for Wine synchronization primitives that will address all their needs and match the Windows behavior well...

Linux 5.11-rc4 was just released and it's looking like a fairly normal release at this stage of development aside from some notable additions that were merged this week...

Linux 5.10.8 is out today as the latest stable release for the Linux 5.10 LTS series. Making this point release notable is that it finally addresses the 5.10 Btrfs performance regression...

The pandemic didn't adversely impact the Gentoo Linux project's operations with seeing the overall number of commits grow by nearly 42% last year within the Gentoo repository. Gentoo also saw commits from 333 unique authors in 2020, up from 333 the year prior. Plus they've made other improvements too for this technical-minded Linux distribution too during 2020...

Apple-focused security/virtualization startup Corellium has posted a very primitive build of Linux for Apple M1 Mac devices...

More improvements for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux are set to land for Linux 5.12...

Given the talk in prior days around patches for PGO'ing the Linux kernel and some readers not being familiar with Profile Guided Optimizations by code compilers, here are some fresh benchmarks on a Ryzen 9 5950X looking at the benefits of applying PGO optimizations to various benchmarks...

For those making use of Linux's modern exFAT file-system, a significant optimization is on the way for when deleting files with the "dirsync" mount option set...

While Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been working out well for modern ARM Mali open-source graphics support, for the old Mali 400/450 series hardware there still is the "Lima" driver within Mesa that doesn't receive too much attention these days (just around 70 commits over the past year) but as its first work of 2021 saw an initial shader cache implementation...

The FreeBSD project today published its Q4-2020 status report concerning all the interesting happenings for this open-source BSD operating system...

Prior to Mesa 21.0 being branched this week in preparations for the quarterly stable Mesa3D release, a number of open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver optimizations were merged...

AMD processors along with older Intel processors will enjoy much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring...

The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM...

Li-Fi that uses LED lighting for wireless communication between devices is a step closer to reality on Linux systems with leading commercial start-up pureLiFi continuing to move closer to upstreaming the driver supporting their hardware that supports this technology...

KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack...

While new feature code is normally not allowed in past the end of the merge window for a given Linux kernel release cycle, Linus Torvalds has decided to merge the newly-published open-source driver code for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut as stable in February...

The CentOS board has approved the creation of a "Hyperscale" SIG spearheaded by engineers from the likes of Facebook and Twitter in aiming to make CentOS Stream more appealing to such large scale server/cloud organizations...

Earlier this week we looked at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux over the past year but how does that compare to the likes of say Fedora and Ubuntu? This article is looking at the performance of Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and Clear Linux on the same hardware over the past year.

For those wanting to run a micro-kernel operating system for your low-cost, open-source friendly PinePhone, the Genode OS framework plans to port to the PinePhone this year. Genode OS and its Sculpt general purpose platform are also wanting to better embrace GPU support in 2021...

Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support. This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle...

With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates...

After experimental builds and the recent release candidates, Valve's Proton 5.13-5 is now available as the latest version of this Wine downstream for powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

Hitting the Mesa tree when Mesa 21.0 was being branched (but looks like it will still make it now part of "staging/21.0") is support for AMD's "rapid packed math" with the RADV driver's ACO compiler back-end...

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library...

Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support...

The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year's iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion...

Alpine Linux, the distribution popular for container environments due to its lightweight nature with employing Musl libc and Busybox while being designed for simplicity, security, and efficiency, is out with version 3.13. With Alpine Linux 3.13 the distribution is ramping up its cloud ambitions...

Wine 6.0 stable is now officially available as the annual stable release for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like platforms...

Following the surprise announcement last month that CentOS 8 will be discontinued at EOY2021 with CentOS Stream to be the new upstream for RHEL, several different organizations and developers have announced their intentions to create new community-oriented, open-source rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that will be free. One of the promising announcements so far has been from CloudLinux and today they have announced it as AlmaLinux...

With GTK4 out and stabilizing well, more GNOME components are working to migrate to this updated toolkit as part of the GNOME 40 development cycle...

Clang LTO for the Linux kernel to provide link-time optimizations for yielding more performant kernel binaries (plus Clang CFI support) looks like it will land for Linux 5.12. With that compiler optimization feature appearing squared away, Google engineers are also working on Clang PGO support for the Linux kernel to exploit profile guided optimizations for further enhancing the kernel performance...

GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority...