Phoronix

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin...

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel...

PipeWire 0.3.57 was released on Friday as the newest update to this Linux audio/video streams management solution that aims to fill the functionality currently provided by the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

The sdl12-compat is a SDL 1.2 compatibility layer implementation atop SDL 2.0. This sdl12-compat project allows for old, out-of-date games and other applications relying on the old SDL 1.2 interface to in turn run via the modern SDL2 library for better compatibility with input devices, Wayland support (assuming no direct X11 hard dependencies), support for PipeWire audio, improved input controls, and various other enhancements only found in SDL 2.0 and not the unmaintained SDL 1.2...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension...

Back in July Intel's Peter Zijlstra proposed "Call Depth Tracking" as a mitigation approach for handling Retbleed and avoiding the "performance horror show" of Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) usage. Out today is the newest version of the Call Depth Tracking code and the performance benchmark results are looking very promising for lessening the pain of the Retbleed CPU mitigation performance impact...

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus...

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel...

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days...

Stemming from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS activating systemd's out-of-memory daemon (systemd-oomd) and users finding their web browser being killed when facing memory or swap pressure, a change has been upstreamed in systemd to help alleviate this situation...

An independent contributor to the open-source Mesa 3D graphics project has begun eyeing AVX-512 support by the LLVMpipe software rasterizer due to AVX-512 being present with the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" processors...

When currently using Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with their new Arc Graphics discrete GPUs, it's simply been reported as "Intel{R} Graphics" for the product/renderer string. With the latest Mesa 22.3-devel work and for back-porting to the current stable series, the graphics card models are beginning to be properly reported...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for August 2022 that show a slight increase to Linux gaming as part of the overall marketshare on a percentage basis...

For those planning to stick to the Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Long-Term Support series still for some time before moving to the newer Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series, Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS is available today as the newest point release in that older series...

Earlier this year AMD's GPUOpen team announced the Orochi project for dynamic HIP/CUDA run-time handling. Orochi makes it easier for application developers to ship AMD HIP and NVIDIA CUDA support within a single code-base / binary that is then selected at run-time based on the GPU in use...

Vulkan 1.3.226 is out this morning and to much excitement adds the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension as cross-vendor functionality for mesh shaders!..

With the Apple M2 running Asahi Linux you may be wondering whether it's better to use the GCC compiler as is the default on upstream Arch Linux or whether going for LLVM Clang will yield better performance given all the LLVM/Clang usage by AArch64 vendors, including Apple's own Xcode compiler toolchain making use of it. If you are wondering about GCC vs. Clang for building binaries on the Apple M2, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite...

Inspired by Microsoft's compiler toolchain having a "std:c++latest" option for automatically targeting the latest supported C++ spec, GCC compiler developers have been discussing the possibility of a similar feature with the ability to specify -std=c++current for the current C++ standard or -std=c++future for the future/draft specification...

One of the interesting capabilities with Thunderbolt and now USB4 that is seemingly not too widely used is for networking between systems. The Linux kernel for the past half-decade already has offered a Thunderbolt networking driver for networking between hosts with Thunderbolt cables. The latest improvement on this front is now supporting USB4's end-to-end flow control mode...