Phoronix

As part of our various Q2'21 and H1'21 Linux/open-source recaps, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news so far this calendar year...

The thermal subsystem updates for the Linux 5.14 kernel include more work on Intel's int340x driver that is used by newer Intel laptops for dealing with their varying thermal control capabilities and exposing more thermal information to user-space for use by Intel's Thermal Daemon (Thermald). This cycle the work includes a new driver that will be used by next-gen Alder Lake SoCs...

GNU Binutils 2.37 has been branched and the release process initiated for these low-level GNU components likely seeing their v2.37 release later this month...

Among the many new features that were sent in so far this week for the Linux 5.14 merge window was the long in-development work on "core scheduling" to reduce the Hyper Threading information leakage risks from side channels and help ensuring deterministic performance on such HT/SMT systems by controlling the resources that can run on a sibling thread. As a follow-up to that article from a few days ago, core scheduling will now be disabled by default...

The Linux kernel's Distributed Lock Manager as a general purpose DLM for kernel and user-space applications with cluster computing systems is seeing a useful reliability improvement with Linux 5.14...

The EXT4 file-system updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window...

Intel open-source engineers continue working on the bring-up around Compute Express Link (CXL) as the new open standard interconnect built off PCIe aiming to empower next-generation servers...

The XFS file-system continues seeing a lot of work cleaning up the kernel driver code as well as some minor feature improvements heading into Linux 5.14...

During the past month were a number of updated Phoronix Test Suite test profiles made available on OpenBenchmarking.org as part of our open-source cross-platform benchmarking framework...

The POWER architecture updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window with a few changes worth pointing out this round...

Darktable 3.6 is out as this summer's feature update to this open-source RAW photography software package and a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom...

KDE developers ended June with yet more Plasma Wayland fixes plus a number of other worthwhile fixes too...

Shipping now as the successor to last November's big OpenZFS 2.0 release is OpenZFS 2.1 as quite a worthy follow-on release...

In celebrating the US holiday weekend, Wine 6.12 has arrived for popping in enjoying the latest Windows games and applications on Linux...

The MMC/MEMSTICK updates for Linux 5.14 bring more work on bettering the kernel's Secure Digital card support...

With Microsoft making public this week their early Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, curiosity got the best of me to give it a whirl in looking at the performance of the early Windows 11 preview build compared to Ubuntu Linux.

Intel has wrapped up a 3+ year effort to overhaul and replace its existing RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) driver. With Linux 5.14 is their shiny new "IRDMA" driver while their former driver is being immediately removed...

Another release candidate of systemd 249 is available for testing while the actual release appears imminent...

Even with Steam Play continuing to get into quite good shape for running recent Windows game releases on Linux with ease thanks to the work Valve has been investing into Proton, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and lower-level Linux graphics infrastructure, for now at least the overall marketshare is holding steady at around 0.8~0.9% for the past number of months...

The 64-bit ARM architecture changes were submitted this week for the ongoing Linux 5.14...