Phoronix

Intel has shipped its second quarter open-source Media Driver release that provides accelerated video encoding/decoding capabilities on Linux systems...

The ACPI CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) Linux CPUFreq driver continues to be improved upon...

Wayland's Weston compositor has provided a weston-info utility to display information on supported Wayland extensions and versioning along with other details of the Wayland compositor environment. That utility is now being spun out as wayland-info as a Wayland compositor-agnostic utility for displaying this information...

For those looking for an RGB lighting and fan speed controller system that works under Linux, the Corsair Commander PRO is slated to see support with the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel cycle...

On top of Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics bringing other media engine improvements and much better 3D graphics support, another exciting element of the next-generation Intel graphics is now confirmed: GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding!..

A Google engineer is looking to discuss at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference the possibility of allowing in-tree Rust language support...

There is an update on the porting effort led by Collabora and Microsoft for layering OpenCL and OpenGL on top of Direct3D 12...

Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 is available today as the latest quarterly stable feature release to our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.

Following a NVIDIA 450 Linux beta with the CUDA 11.0-rc in early June and the more formal NVIDIA 450.51 Linux beta later in June, NVIDIA has now promoted the 450 Linux driver series to stable with today's release of the 450.57 driver build...

The first release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 246 is now available for testing...

It took the GNOME/Ubuntu side until Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt picked up a 4K display with Intel graphics for various 4K/Intel graphics optimizations to be discovered and continue to be addressed for the GNOME desktop. Now on the KDE side, well known contributor Nate Graham recently picked up a new laptop with HiDPI display and there he has been working to resolve a number of lingering high DPI issues on the KDE front...

In response to the largely critical feedback of LibreOffice 7.0-RC1's branding as "Personal Edition" for the standard version of this open-source office suite, the branding is being reconsidered to either delay it until LibreOffice 7.1 or potentially relabel it as the "Community Edition" version...

It took a month after Arm disclosed the CPU "SLS" vulnerability and when the LLVM compiler landed their initial mitigation, but the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now has mitigations as well for this Straight Line Speculation vulnerability...

Following last week's release of openSUSE Leap 15.2, this latest community, SUSE-backed Linux distribution release is now available via the Microsoft Store...

There is a last minute change from a Microsoft engineer to the upcoming systemd 246 that is now undergoing release preparations...

Mesa 20.1.3 is out as the newest bi-weekly point release for this stable Mesa3D series...

A day after the GNOME 3.37.4 development release, out today is GNOME 3.36.4 as the latest stable point release for the current desktop series...

Linus Torvalds has decided to up the compiler build requirement for the Linux kernel to GCC 4.9...

Open Usage Commons is a new organization announced today that is backed by Google for helping open-source projects in managing their trademarks...

SUSE is upping their container game by acquiring Rancher Labs...

Intel has today made public more details on their next-generation Thunderbolt connectivity that brings more features while offering USB4 specification compliance. Thunderbolt 4 is coming with forthcoming Tiger Lake laptops...

Intel CPUs have long supported LBR for last branch records as a means of recording the branches to which software has taken along with exposing other control flow information. This has relied upon model-specific registers while with future Intel CPUs this is being folded into a more universal CPU architectural feature. Support for Intel "Arch LBR" is set to come later this year with the Linux 5.9 kernel...

The proposal for using Btrfs by default on the Fedora desktop is gaining a fair amount of traction and interest from the community and could possibly move ahead but further testing and decisions are still to be made...

Released on Tuesday was GNOME 3.37.3 but missing the mark in time for that proper milestone were the all important GNOME Shell and Mutter components. But a few hours past the mark, they were released and come with some big changes...

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware now has working multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) for Arm Midgard hardware...

NVIDIA appears to have quietly promoted CUDA 11.0 to its stable channel...

PTGui as one of the leading panorama photo stitching software programs on Windows and macOS has finally been ported to Linux...

Gentoo's Project Android is out with a new stage3 Android prefix tarball for those wanting to enjoy a Gentoo experience atop a rooted Android device...

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux continues to see a lot of interesting developments for this file-system beginning to appear on more Android devices and elsewhere given its feature set from flash optimizations to native encryption and compression capabilities...

Complementing this morning's AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT / Ryzen 7 3800XT / Ryzen 9 3900XT Linux benchmarks, here is a side-by-side look at the Ryzen 9 3900XT up against the Core i9 10900K and the Ryzen 5 3600XT up against the Core i5 10600K for these competing processors. This is a quick look at how these competing models stack up in the 130+ benchmarks utilized so far...

GNOME 3.37.3 is out today as the newest development snapshot working towards the September release of GNOME 3.38...

After the AMD Ryzen 3000XT series was announced last month, these new higher-clocked Zen 2 desktop processors are shipping today. Here are 130+ benchmarks on each of the Ryzen 5 3600XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 9 3900XT parts compared to various Intel and AMD CPUs. Tests under Ubuntu Linux and also complemented by performance-per-Watt / power and performance-per-dollar data points.

The Khronos Group today continued with their relatively recent trend of the past few years of open-sourcing their conformance tests. The OpenXR conformance tests are now open-source...

It looks like the long ongoing work for compressing the Linux kernel image with Zstd might finally soon be mainlined, potentially for next month's Linux 5.9 cycle kicking off as the "v6" patches sent out this week were done as a Git pull request...

Introduced alongside CentOS 8 last year was CentOS Stream as a developer-focused, rolling-release of CentOS/RHEL. With those processes getting squared away and CentOS recently debuting its RHEL 8.2 rebuild, CentOS Stream is beginning to see new and interesting material...

Earlier this year was news of GNU Guix wanting to replace their Linux kernel usage with the Hurd microkernel. For those interested, the project recently began producing system images with indeed Hurd wired up for this software distribution...

Experimental patches under discussion for the GNU C Library (glibc) would make it easier to dynamically load optimized libraries (shared objects) on systems depending upon the CPU in use and its hardware capabilities. This glibc-hwcaps work stems from the desired work on being able to better leverage Linux performance optimizations on AMD Zen-based systems but the hardware capabilities patches themselves can help any CPU microarchitecture family in more easily shipping optimized support...

The mouse reporting functionality offered by the Linux VT console is rather basic and seemingly seldom used by text-based, mouse-aware programs. However, a series of patches was sent out this week for improving the implementation to provide for more xterm-like mouse reporting...

While upstream Wine developers continue working on VKD3D for providing a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer for Wine, a developer on Valve's Proton team has now forked it as Proton-VKD3D for focusing their efforts on getting the D3D12 support moved along for Proton that powers Steam Play...

Yes, it's true the LibreOffice builds in recent days -- including the new LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 -- have "Personal Edition" branding for the open-source builds. But given user concerns, The Document Foundation board has issued some clarifications to try to ease any immediate rumors, etc...

For those that have been considering the Seagate FireCuda 520 as a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive, here are some benchmarks under Ubuntu Linux with this ZP500GM3A002 drive.

With just about one month to go until the official release, the first release candidate is out today of the LibreOffice 7.0 open-source, cross-platform office suite software...

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC...

It was just a few days ago that the LLVMpipe OpenGL software rasterizer within Mesa finally achieved OpenGL 4.0 support while today it has crossed both OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 milestones...

Building upon Intel working on GNU toolchain support for AMX, the newly-detailed Advanced Matrix Extensions being introduced next year with "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon CPUs, the GCC compiler support has been sent out in patch form...

The 64-bit ARM code building up for the Linux 5.9 cycle is set to mainline Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support as another security improvement inbound...

While last Sunday Linus Torvalds was concerned over a big Linux 5.8-rc3 release, this Sunday he is reporting that Linux 5.8-rc4 is on the smaller side...

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime has seen a lot of features added this year and the most recent is support for OpenXR's XR_EXTX_overlay extension to allow for multi-application / overlay rendering...

Edward Shishkin continues pursuing development of new file-system functionality for Reiser5, the next-generation evolutionary advancement over the controversial Reiser4 file-system...

Back in April I wrote about patches for enabling FBC on the Intel 865 chipset nearly two decades after that chipset first shipped. Those patches didn't yet hit the mainline Linux kernel but they were revived again this week...