Phoronix

It looks like within the coming days that the Vulkan ray-tracing support for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver will be upstreamed for Mesa 21.3...

In addition to the block subsystem changes submitted for the Linux 5.15 merge window, Jens Axboe also sent in a separate pull request for this new kernel cycle to provide support for bio recycling. In turn this can enhance the Linux I/O limits by around 10%...

Pyston began many years ago as an open-source JIT-based Python implementation developed by Dropbox. But after Dropbox dropped Pyston development, it went dormant for several years before the developers decided to create their own start-up around it and released Pyston 2.0. The Pyston developers are now joining well known Python organization Anaconda...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and I/O expert Jens Axboe sent in his set of feature pull requests today for the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his pull requests bright and early as usual for the just-opened Linux 5.15 merge window. With the scheduler changes for this next kernel version there are some improvements worth mentioning but also worth mentioning is what hasn't found its way to the kernel yet: any software optimizations around Intel Thread Director for upcoming Alder Lake processors...

Worked on for more than one year is the patches out of Amazon for allowing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. This L1d flushing is done in the name of greater security given the various CPU speculative execution hardware vulnerabilities these days and protecting against other possible future vulnerabilities. After trying to get the code merged last summer, Linus Torvalds called it "beyond stupid" and reverted the code but now for Linux 5.15 a revised form of it was submitted...

For those after an easy-to-use desktop distribution built off Arch Linux, Endeavour OS continues filling the void left by the former Antergos project. Endeavour OS is closing out August by releasing new ISOs that include a number of updates to its installer...

One of the very first pull requests for Linux 5.15 now that its merge window is open following the Linux 5.14 release is to merge KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 protocol file server...

Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions...

As expected Linus Torvalds promoted Linux 5.14 to stable in providing the latest features, hardware support, and other improvements ahead of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution releases...

The Linux hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem for the 5.15 cycle is already seeing the AMD SB-RMI driver and AMD Cezanne Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring while there was also some last-minute additions around AMD next-gen "Yellow Carp" temperature reporting and separately support for another water cooling pump...

While the Linux 5.15 merge window opening is imminent, merged today to net-next were the latest batch of wireless driver updates for this next kernel version. Notable to this batch of WiFi driver updates was the new Intel material...

Near the beginning of the year was some rare work on Linux's floppy disk driver and -- a half-year later -- it was found out that not only do people with systems using floppy disks still move to newer kernels, but that work earlier in the year had regressed the Linux kernel's floppy disk handling. Now coming for Linux 5.15 is a fix...

If all goes according to plan the Linux 5.14 kernel will be released as stable today. Linux 5.14 has many new features but there is also a lot of work slated for the next cycle, Linux 5.15. Here's a look...

The Chrome/Chromium web browser now has fully-enabled the Ozone/X11 platform support across both beta and stable channels...

Here should hopefully be a great indication about AMD's Linux efforts moving forward with one of their recent and exciting hires at the company...

In preparation for the support within their Vulkan driver, the Intel-led effort for preparing mesh shader support within Mesa's NIR and SPIR-V code has now been merged...

It's been a relatively quiet summer in the Wine-Staging world with not many new patches surfacing for testing/experimental purposes for this more bleeding edge version of Wine. However, with Wine-Staging 6.16 there are at least some new patches now to talk about...

The Plasma 5.23 desktop release is looking like it will be quite an eventful milestone while KDE developers are finishing August strong with many improvements and fixes across their desktop stack...

ROCm 4.3 released at the start of August with support for HMM memory allocations, support for indirect function calls and C++ virtual functions with the ROCm compiler, improved data center tool integration, better rocBLAS performance, and a range of other improvements. In approaching the end of August, ROCm 4.3.1 is now available...