Phoronix

Back in 2018 Intel announced Sound Open Firmware (SOF) as their push for open-source sound firmware and looking to drive new software innovations in the audio DSP space. Out this week is Sound Open Firmware 2.2 for providing the newest features for this open-source software stack supporting Windows and Linux...

For those interested in the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics IP its newest feature is supporting GLSL asynchronous shader compilation...

For those enjoying some Linux gaming over the US holiday weekend, NVIDIA issued a rare Saturday driver update in the form of new Vulkan driver betas for Windows and Linux...

Darktable 4.0 has debuted today as a major update to this open-source, cross-platform RAW photography software suite...

After many months and a lot of work by the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developers, Linux 5.20 looks like it will be the base kernel where the DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics desktop GPUs and Arctic Sound M (ATS-M) server graphics card support will be ready in usable shape...

Linux Mint 21 is working its way toward release this summer as the latest version of this desktop OS that is being built atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Unlike Ubuntu 22.04 upstream that is now using systemd-oomd by default on the desktop to try to improve the low memory / system memory pressure experience, Linux Mint has now decided to avoid this daemon due to user criticism...

It's sadly been years since having anything major to report on for Xonotic, the open-source first person shooter game that started out many years ago as Nexuiz. Thankfully a new version of Xonotic was published this week and while it's just a point release, it does come with many improvements...

Firewalld 1.2 was released on Friday as the newest feature release for this Linux firewall daemon. Bug fix releases for existing stable series were released with Firewalld 1.1.2, 1.0.5, and 0.9.9...

The summer months aren't slowing down KDE developers as it's been another busy week of bug fixes and feature work for KDE developers to kick off July...

Vulkan 1.3.219 released this week and in addition to a number of documentation clarifications/corrections there are two new extensions...

With the new month comes the latest figures from Valve regarding the Steam on Linux marketshare and other metrics for the past month as a result of the Steam Survey...

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...