Phoronix

OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 was released this FOSDEM weekend for this distribution derived from the once great Mandriva Linux, formerly Mandrake...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.17-rc3 as the latest test kernel for Linux 5.17 that should be out as stable before the end of March...

The Linux 5.18 kernel this spring is adding support for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI, also talked about sometimes as the Enhanced Hardware Feedback interface - EHFI)...

While the Apple M1 SoC is a great piece of hardware, a large part of what has made Apple Silicon so successful with their newest Macs has been their Rosetta 2 software for dynamically translating x86/x86_64 software to run well on these 64-bit Arm systems. Existing applications and games optimized for prior Intel Macs continue running generally in excellent shape on their newest hardware thanks to Rosetta 2. While there is the ongoing Linux bring-up work for Apple Silicon on Linux, the open-source world doesn't currently have that advantage of a compelling Rosetta 2 alternative but the FEX-Emu project hopes to change that outlook...

While Linux 5.17 is introducing the ASUS WMI EC Sensors driver for greatly expanding Linux's support for hardware sensor coverage on newer ASUS desktop motherboards, already with Linux 5.18 that driver will be deprecated to make way for a new ASUS EC sensor driver replacement...

A Linux kernel driver was posted today for platform control support for Valve's upcoming Steam Deck...

Besides all of the Linux-focused talks at the annual FOSDEM conference, another favorite track of mine is that on micro-kernels and other operating systems. While there wasn't the GNU/Hurd status update in 2022 as there has been in some recent years, there was a talk over GNU/Hurd using NetBSD kernel drivers in order to expand its hardware coverage...

For use with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Oracle this week released Oracle Linux 8.5 onto the Microsoft Store...

There's been some activity on AMD open-source firmware support for newer hardware platforms but for those wanting a fully open-source firmware stack, there remains work on older generations of AMD server platforms. Michał Żygowski of firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented today at FOSDEM 2022 as to the current state AMD open-source firmware efforts around Coreboot...

Microsoft continues work on their controversial "DXGKRNL" driver they hope to mainline into the Linux kernel for benefiting their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) efforts...

Intel has for a while been posting Linux kernel patches for implementing Control Flow Enforcement (CET) technology, both for the Indirect Branch Tracking and Shadow Stack features. However, as written about earlier this week, Intel is focusing on the shadow stack support for user-space. The patches posted this past week by Intel for Linux Shadow Stack for User-Space support was limited to their own processors but fortunately it's appearing to be work out fine for AMD CPUs too...

KDE continues seeing a lot of Wayland fixes landing as well as general crash fixes and addressing other glitches with this popular desktop environment...

Ahead of the Steam Deck shipping later this month, here is where the Steam on Linux marketshare currently stands...

While it's not the same as sitting in Brussels and enjoying some Belgian beers while socializing in-person with developers, the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is happening this weekend online...

As a particularly important move for Linux gamers and enthusiasts where you may be riding frequent Git builds of new Mesa graphics drivers or even the bi-weekly point releases - compared to the multi-week/monthly update regiment for Windows graphics drivers - Valve's Steam client will now flush its stale shader cache upon GPU/driver changes. This is important for conserving disk space especially where storage constraints are possible like with the Steam Deck...

In a short period of time Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D driver has gone from implementing OpenGL 3.3 atop the Direct3D 12 interface to now having working OpenGL 4.2 support...

As part of an effort to update LLVM Clang's "-mtune" handling to cater to newer processors, AMD Zen processors with LLVM/Clang 15 later this year will be able to enjoy faster and more accurate square root calculations with tuning to use SQRTSS/SQRTPS instructions...

Libinput 1.19 launched last September with high resolution scroll wheel support finally in place while libinput 1.20 is in preparation for release that improves that functionality. Libinput 1.20 also makes other improvements to this widely-used input library on the Linux desktop that is leveraged by both X.Org and Wayland based environments...

Back in the day I enjoyed Zenwalk as a great desktop-focused, ready out-of-the-box Linux distribution built atop Slackware. After not hearing much from the project in a while, I am glad to see it's still going strong and they have today issued Zenwalk 15 that is built atop the newly-released Slackware 15.0...

Ahead of the planned release of Qt 6.3.0 next month, The Qt Company today has made available the first Qt 6.3 beta...