Phoronix

The mdadm utility for managing Linux software RAID arrays is out with a new release -- its first in more than three years...

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell"...

Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing...

It's coming a few days late due to New Year's, but Wine 7.0-rc4 is out as the latest weekly release candidate for this forthcoming yearly stable release. Wine 7.0 is the imminent feature update for this open-source software allowing Windows games/applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...

In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default...

Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux...

Well known Solus Project core team member and Experience Lead Joshua Strobl has announced he is stepping down from the project but will be continuing his work on the Budgie desktop...

The LLVM compiler stack saw record growth in 2021 both with the most amount of new code introduced in any single year as well as the most contributors per year this open-source project has ever seen. Even aside from the development metrics, LLVM had a pretty rocking 2021...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers...

A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level...

While the Linux 5.16 kernel release and in turn the Linux 5.17 merge window isn't happening for another week, the media subsystem pull request for v5.17 has already been mailed out with its various feature changes for this next cycle...

There were a ton of exciting kernel improvements merged in 2021 as well as introducing new hardware support and more. But for as exciting as the year was, it actually ticked lower than usual on both a commit and line count basis. Here is a look at some of the popular kernel topics in 2021 as well as a look at the yearly Git development statistics...

For those wanting to enjoy the F1 2021 racing game on Linux via Valve's Steam Play, it's slowly getting into good shape. The latest enhancement is on the Radeon Vulkan driver side with Mesa's RADV adding a workaround targeting the game...

Haiku as the open-source operating system in development for two decades as the inspirational successor to BeOS is kicking off 2022 by.... beginning to be able to run Windows applications via Wine. There is great progress being made in porting Wine to running on Haiku...

Since we are all about performance and numbers, here is a look at the 2021 statistics for OpenBenchmarking.org itself as the online complementary component to the Phoronix Test Suite...

Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available...

KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations...

It's now another year in the books and in just six months and a few days will mark 18 years since starting Phoronix.com and 14 years of developing the public, open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software...

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.

GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit...