Phoronix

Wine 7.12 is out as the newest development release of this program for running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

The size of the linux-firmware.git tree continues to grow with Linux continuing to support more and more modern hardware that is increasingly reliant upon firmware blobs for operation. Most Linux distributions like Fedora end up installing this entire set of Linux firmware files that can easily be 200~300MB even though most systems only use a few select files. With Fedora 37 later this year they are hoping to better deal with the situation by splitting up of linux-firmware and only installing sets of firmware packages depending upon the actual hardware in use...

RISC-V International has relayed word to us that in China the DeepComputing and Xcalibyte organizations have announced pre-orders on the first RISC-V laptop intended for developers. The "ROMA" development platform features a quad-core RISC-V processor, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and should work with most RISC-V Linux distributions...

With my review last month of the HP Dev One laptop powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and running Pop!_OS I benchmarked it against various laptops I had locally with both AMD and Intel CPUs, including the likes of the very common Tiger Lake SoCs. At the time I hadn't any newer Alder Lake P laptops but now with a Core i7 1280P laptop in hand, here is a look at how that AMD Cezanne Linux laptop can compete with Intel's brand new Alder Lake P SoCs with the flagship Core i7 1280P.

While XWayland is normally used just for running root-less single applications like games within an otherwise native Wayland desktop, new patches from Red Hat that have been merged into the X.Org Server enhance XWayland's existing "root-full" mode of operation for allowing entire desktop environments and window managers to nicely function within the context of XWayland...

As part of the work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver, Valve engineers developed the "ACO" compiler back-end that is now used by default for RADV and has shown to deliver better performance at least for RADV than using AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. There has long been talk about adding ACO support to RadeonSI while in recent weeks there has been new code activity on that front...

During the past month there was a lot of exciting Linux kernel activity, the launch of the HP Dev One, never-ending open-source graphics driver advancements, and much more -- in addition to marking Phoronix turning 18 years old. Here is a look back at the June highlights...

Intel on Friday released libva 2.15 as the newest update to the open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) library used on modern systems for GPU-accelerated video decoding...

Valve has published a SteamOS 3.3 Beta today for those Steam Deck owners or those otherwise loading this Arch Linux based OS image onto their own hardware...

It's been over a half-year since the last Wayland update with the core code now largely mature, but out today is Wayland 1.21 with the new wl_pointer high-resolution scroll event as well as some smaller additions and fixes...

This month Ubuntu developers have been trying to figure out how to best deal with systemd-oomd on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS killing applications like Firefox during high memory/swap use and that leading to a poor user experience when desktop users not being aware of the situation and suddenly finding their software killed...

Rust 1.62 is out today as the latest update to this popular systems programming language with a few notable changes...

It was on this day in 1992 that Silicon Graphics (SGI) released OpenGL to the world...

Over the many years of covering Coreboot (going back to when it was called LinuxBIOS!) on Phoronix the selection of supported motherboards has been rather unfortunate especially over the last decade. If wanting to run Coreboot on a system today it basically means running a Google Chromebook, using an outdated server motherboard or old Lenovo ThinkPad that has seen a Coreboot port, or out of reach to most individuals are various server motherboards that are reference platforms or board designs from hyperscalers. But over the past several months the folks at the 3mdeb consulting firm have carried out a terrific feat: porting their "Dasharo" downstream of Coreboot to a modern and readily available Intel desktop motherboard. I've been trying this out and it has worked out surprisingly well. Here are my experiences and benchmarks of Coreboot/Dasharo on this Intel Alder Lake motherboard.

Intel has sent in their latest batch of drm-intel-gt-next changes to DRM-Next of their i915 kernel graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.20. In addition to a lot of code churn still around DG2/Alchemist, the open-source Intel driver for Linux 5.20 is also making more preparations for Ponte Vecchio enablement...

Earlier this month Intel began committing Meteor Lake code to Coreboot for beginning to enable what will be the 14th Gen Core processors under this open-source system firmware solution used by Google Chromebooks and other use-cases. Intel engineers are ending out June with more Meteor Lake enablement code landing ahead of these processors expected to launch in 2023...

The newest member of the Raspberry Pi family is the Pico W and will set you back $6...

To this point Fedora out-of-the-box has been restricted to a filtered subset of Flathub packages when enabled via GNOME Software or GNOME Initial Setup. However, legal has now cleared Fedora for allowing unfiltered/unrestricted access to Flathub, allowing a far greater selection of Flatpaks to become available on Fedora Linux with the plan for this to begin with Fedora 37...

Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is out today as the newest Ubuntu mobile operating system update for smartphones from the folks at UBports that continues maintaining the code-base left by Canonical and now pushing ahead in their own direction...

Stemming from last weeks Linux kernel patches suggesting an -O3 experimental option for all CPU architectures and Linus Torvalds rather quickly shooting it down, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance when the kernel image is rebuilt with the -O3 optimization level rather than -O2.