Phoronix

Following RadeonSI seeing optimizations around AMD Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support last month, the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" within Mesa 21.0 is also seeing similar treatment...

Another one of the features you won't find in the Linux 5.11 kernel is support for the recently ratified NVMe Simple Copy but work on supporting that feature continues...

The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance...

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread...

Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking...

In ending out a strong year for OpenBenchmarking.org growth in 2020, there were also many test profile updates and some new test profiles (benchmarks) that were made available in December for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org users...

LLVM has added support for PowerPC LE as its newest target...

The numbers Steam posted on New Year's Day for the December 2020 Linux gaming marketshare showed a drop of 0.33% down to just 0.57%. That is a rather large drop but now Valve has updated their numbers and point to Linux still regressing percentage wise but not as bad as originally reported...

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features...

Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer...

Yesterday I wrote about the DTPM framework being sent in for Linux 5.11 but ultimately Linus Torvalds has decided not to accept it out of the merge window...

Wine 6.0 stable should be out this month but for now is another weekly release candidate of this open-source project that allows running Windows games/applications on Linux, macOS, and BSD platforms...

The Linux kernel has been seeing incredible innovations and optimizations in the I/O area in recent times from IO_uring to numerous performance enhancements. One of the recent performance enhancements seeing activity and promising results is the no-copy bvec behavior...

The latest OpenCL "Clover" work to land in Mesa 21.0 is support for the cl_khr_il_program extension...

For as great as Linux 5.11 is with its new features, there is also some prominent material that has yet to be upstreamed into the mainline kernel -- some of which is likely to hit in 2021 while other changes have less likely ambitions for mainline...

ReactOS as the long work-in-progress open-source operating system implementation of Windows enjoyed much progress over the course of 2020...

While development on KDE (and other open-source projects too) was lighter this week as a result of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the KDE desktop still saw some refinements this week...

Valve just published their Steam Survey numbers for December 2020 and it's a huge letdown for Linux gamers if the numbers are indeed accurate...

While the Linux 5.11 merge window has been over for one week where new features are normally added, a power management pull request sent in today for mainline is adding some tardy features including the Dynamic Thermal Power Management (DTPM) framework that in part is designed to help ensure users don't burn themselves with hot devices...