Phoronix

Earlier this month AMD released AOCC 3.2 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler focused on delivering optimized Zen performance. With our initial AMD AOCC 3.2 benchmarks on Zen 3, there is nice incremental improvement compared to the prior 3.x releases. But how does this AMD-optimized compiler stack up against the upstream LLVM Clang and GCC compilers? Here is a look at the AMD AOCC performance against the current Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers.

For those with systems making use of an Intel "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controller, a Linux kernel driver improvement working its way to mainline should yield thermal/power benefits...

Last year there was some work for getting Gallium3D Zink working on macOS for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to in turn run it atop the MoltenVK library for translating the Vulkan calls to Apple's Metal graphics/compute API. That work fell into disrepair but now the fixed up code for allowing Zink to build on Apple's operating system has been merged into Mesa 22.0...

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the year with the many milestones they achieved in ramping up their support both for desktop/mobile and server hardware and continued successes when it comes to their open-source Radeon graphics driver stack...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver providing the open-source kernel display/graphics support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has ready its batch of changes for DRM-Next to appear in Linux 5.17...

Intel open-source engineers have prepared "PFRUT" support for Platform Firmware Runtime Updates for allowing (U)EFI capsule updates to be performed on capable systems without rebooting the system in order to eliminate downtime...

Queued into the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle are some Alder Lake audio updates...

As we hit the end of 2021 for those wondering about the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland gaming performance difference for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver stack and desktops on Ubuntu 21.10.

With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year...

Microsoft continues improving the Gallium3D Direct3D 12 path within Mesa for getting more of OpenGL running atop it on Windows...

The BSDs continue to lag behind Linux when it comes to the graphics driver support, but this time the Intel Whiskey Lake graphics should have been in long ago -- and believed to be -- but adding the PCI IDs were forgotten...

While not nearly as featureful as say OpenShot or Kdenlive, Avidemux is an open-source video editor that is simple to use and has been around for a long time. Avidemux 2.8 is now available as the latest feature release...

AMD Smart Trace Buffer "STB" support is ready for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel cycle...

Last week I posted some benchmarks looking at the laptop battery life implications of GNOME's Wayland vs. X.Org sessions. From that testing with a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U laptop, the GNOME Wayland session led to around 3 Watt lower power consumption than with the same software stack while logging into the X.Org-based session. For those curious about the KDE Wayland vs. X.Org power impact, here is the same set of tests carried out in the KDE space...

LibreOffice 7.3 is due out in early February while for ensuring it will be another successful feature release to this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 7.3 RC1 was made available today for some nice holiday testing...

Intel's modern WiFi driver "IWLWIFI" is set to see a number of improvements with the Linux 5.17 kernel development cycle kicking off in January...

AMD's official Vulkan driver team is ending out the year by pushing out AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver implementation for Linux systems. This alternative to the Mesa RADV driver finally has fixed up its very poor performance for Vulkan under Wayland...

Carsten Haitzler released a new version of the Enlightenment window manager / shell (and Wayland compositor) for Christmas. Various Enlightenment components have also seen new releases...

It was nearly four years ago already that Intel announced Sound Open Firmware in pushing for open-source sound firmware for their hardware. The Sound Open Firmware effort has been a great success even if it's not a shiny project widely talked about among consumers. Just prior to the holidays Sound Open Firmware 2.0 was quietly released...

When it comes to the Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtual machine targets, the most powerful option under Linux right now is the Quadra 800. That though for virtualization purposes isn't too useful by today's standards with being limited to 1GB of RAM and limited interface support. But a new Virtual M68k Machine aims to provide a more useful target and support has already landed in QEMU while the Linux kernel support is pending...