Phoronix

On New Year's Eve, Greg Kroah-Hartman released a new set of stable kernels with Linux 6.1.2, 6.0.16, and 5.15.86 LTS being the new set...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working with the Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now and recently the performance has also picked up nicely as shown in recent benchmarks. But for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions to be exposed has required setting the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable, but that has now changed initially for those two games...

For those Linux gamers and enthusiasts using the current Mesa 22.3 series, Mesa 22.3.2 was released this New Year's Eve for delivering the latest batch of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes...

It shouldn't be too surprising given the pace of beta releases and planning for post-4.0 releases, but the open-source Godot game engine is planning for its major Godot 4.0 stable release to happen in the "first months" of 2023...

AMD in 2022 continued its open-source/Linux support embrace with offering good launch-day support on both the CPU and GPU sides with their new products, continued ramping up their Linux support on the client side, and has worked more on optimizations and other enhancements to their Linux support...

Fedora has a tradition of always shipping with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components and central to that is always having the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At times this up-to-date toolchain quest has meant shipping a release candidate / near-final GCC build when it comes to their Q2 release of the year that often lands right around the same time as the annual GCC feature release. Fedora 38 will be another release to again aim for the very latest GNU compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have wrapped up another busy year enhancing their open-source desktop environment and application stack...

The Linux USB gadget kernel driver saw a patch published today for exposing of a device's landing page as part of the WebUSB specification. WebUSB as a reminder is the industry standard for providing a JavaScript API to securely access USB devices from web pages and is already supported by the likes of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge...

One of the early alternative spins of Ubuntu back in the day was Edubuntu as an education-focused flavor of Ubuntu shipping with various educational packages pre-installed and an optimized workflow for students. Edubuntu gradually faded away but in 2023 is looking to re-establish itself and become an official flavor under new leadership...

While there still are a few more articles coming up on Phoronix over the next day before closing out 2022, for this year on Phoronix there were 191 Linux hardware reviews and featured articles along with 2,846 original news articles on Linux, open-source, and hardware topics. Here is a look back at what excited our Linux/open-source readers the most over the course of 2022...

For going along with the new keyboard driver and other upstreaming efforts around the PinePhone Pro, getting the display support mainlined has been the latest effort for enhancing this $399 Linux smartphone...

It shouldn't be news to you that most of the corporate-backed developers working on the Linux desktop are no longer investing in new feature work around the X.Org Server and have shifted their efforts to a Wayland-focused environment moving forward. In looking at the Git statistics for the X.Org Server over the course of 2022 it shows how the development has pulled back dramatically and now at a two decade low for the commits and code changes...

Calculate Linux has now issued its v23 release as the project marks fifteen years of being a Gentoo Linux built distribution focused on suitable Linux deployments within organizations / corporate environments...

Merged just over a year ago into the Linux kernel was DAMON as an Amazon-developed solution for monitoring data accesses. In the year since being merged, DAMON has continued to see more functionality added and new users and developers becoming involved with this data access monitoring...

With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.

Valve developers investing heavily into the open-source 3D graphics driver stack, AMD continuing their big contributions to Mesa, the Apple AGX Gallium3D driver taking shape, Microsoft continuing to leverage Mesa for various purposes on Windows, Zink maturing for OpenGL atop Vulkan, and other efforts all culminated with the most ever code growth to Mesa in a single year as well as nearly the most ever commits to this 3D graphics driver project...

Earlier this month prolific open-source GPU driver developer David Airlie at Red Hat picked up work again on Vulkan Video support for the RADV driver. Initially that RADV Vulkan Video work was focused on H.264 and H.265 video decoding while since then he has shifted focus to initial video encode support with H.264...

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in that have been early adopters to the Linux 6.1 kernel released as stable earlier this month and now finding their HDMI audio outputs no longer working. Fortunately, the issue has been sorted out by upstream developers and a fix is on the way...

OpenCV 4.7 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision library...

When the Retbleed security vulnerability was introduced earlier this year mitigating it for Intel Skylake and Skylake-derived CPU cores required imposing Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) that further tanked the out-of-the-box performance for these aging Intel CPUs. But being introduced now with Linux 6.2 is a new mitigation technique named Call Depth Tracking that is helping recover some of that lost performance and in turn extending the usefulness of the Skylake-derived processors still in service.