Phoronix

SDL 2.24 has been released as the newest update to this widely-used abstraction layer library commonly used by cross-platform games, including heavily by games on Steam...

Last week I published initial Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux benchmarks using Asahi Linux and Arch Linux across the board. For ending out this week, here is a follow-up article looking more closely at the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3. This time around are also results from performance tweaks to each laptop for the CPUFreq governor and platform profile.

AMD has put out another point release in the ROCm 5.2 series for their "Radeon Open eCosystem" GPU compute stack for Linux...

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks...

Tow-Boot 2021.10-005 is now available for this open-source project that describes itself as "an opinionated distribution of U-Boot."..

Out this morning is version 12.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection...

For what used to be known as part of the KDE Software Compilation... Then most recently the straight-forward KDE Applications name to refer to the set of official KDE applications... Now KDE Gear is the current name for the official set of KDE applications. KDE Gear 22.08 is out today as the newest collection of KDE apps...

Following optional "__bf16" support being added to the x86-64 psABI as a special type for representing 16-bit Brain Floating Point Format for deep learning / machine learning applications, the GCC and LLVM compilers have now landed their __bf16 type support...

Made public back in June by Intel was the MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities. The disclosure noted affected Intel products range from Haswell up through Rocket Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake servers. However, pre-Haswell Intel CPUs might be impacted too while the Linux kernel to this point was incorrectly stating older CPUs are "not affected" by MMIO Stale Data...

While the Qt Group (most recently known as The Qt Company) is known for its Qt toolkit and related Qt Creator integrated development environment, Qt Design Studio, and related software centered around their cross-platform toolkit, they have acquired German software maker Axivion GmbH as they expand their product portfolio beyond just Qt...

With Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids expected to make more of a splash coming up, it's a good time to revisit the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" performance to see how the Linux software performance has evolved since last year's launch. In this article are benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server from May 2021 with CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu compared to fresh installs now of those latest Linux distribution releases.

LibreOffice 7.4 is out today as the latest major update to this open-source, cross-platform office suite. This leading free software office suite now supports WebP images as well as a variety of other improvements to its various components...

While Intel is normally fast at contributing improvements for new hardware to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, just today and ahead of the approaching Raptor Lake launch has a proper scheduler model finally been added for existing Alder Lake P processors...

AMD has published their latest routine snapshot of AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal cross-platform Vulkan driver sources and is an alternative to the unofficial but popular Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver...

Last year marked the release of Mold 1.0 as a modern, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold was started by Rui Ueyama who previously worked on the LLVM linker. Mold has continued seeing new features added and out today is version 1.4.1 where "alpha" support for macOS is added and also beginning to work on CMake build system integration...

Krita 5.1 is out today as the newest evolutionary update to this leading open-source, cross-platform digital painting program...

Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" is one of the most exciting low-level kernel innovations in recent time and is already used by Google's Chrome OS and Android as well as having proven itself in various other downstream kernel builds. MGLRU is planned for upstreaming in Linux 6.1 and in preparation for that, Andrew Morton has now queued those patches into his "mm-unstable" branch for further vetting...

NTFS3 as the modern Linux kernel read/write file-system driver for NTFS that was open-sourced by Paragon Software is seeing some late code refactoring and fixes for Linux 6.0...

VEIKK is a company I previously hadn't heard of that offers a range of pen displays and drawing tablets for digital artists. At first when they reached out around reviewing one of their drawing tablets, I questioned their Linux support but it turns out their graphics tablets do work across all major platforms. I've been trying out the VEIKK VK1200 the past few weeks and it's been working out decent as a 11.6-inch drawing monitor for just $169 USD.

Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer...