Phoronix

Mesa's V3D and V3DV drivers providing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, respectively, for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware now has a double buffer mode implemented. This is a win for numerous workloads for these drivers most notably used by modern Raspberry Pi single board computers...

The Qt Company just announced Qt 6.3 Alpha as the first formal test release for this next Qt6 toolkit update. The Qt Company also lifted the lid on their new Qt Quick Compiler where they are aiming for QML to run at "a speed close to native" for that interpreted language...

It turns out Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is planning to use the Linux 5.15 kernel as its default kernel. It makes sense in that Linux 5.15 is also a long-term support kernel, but unfortunate in that Ubuntu LTS releases haven't always used LTS kernel versions and v5.15 will be a half-year old already by the time the "Jammy Jellyfish" ships in April. This is a choice particularly unfortunate for those with recent hardware but at least there is the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and other non-default options available...

In addition to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers being quite busy preparing for upcoming Intel Arc "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards on the consumer side, they have concurrently been preparing for Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" hardware too. One of the big undertakings on that side from the driver perspective is bringing up multiple tiles...

While the MIPS CPU architecture itself is at the end of the road, kernel developers still are busy with MIPS considering the Loongson hardware that is popular in China and lots of older MIPS hardware out there lacking mainline Linux kernel support. For Linux 5.17 several more older, consumer-grade network routers are seeing mainline support...

A draft merge request has been opened for landing "Copper" within Mesa...

Landing this week as part of the various subsystems overseen by Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman were the USB changes for Linux 5.17...

Back in 2019 the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support for that file format used several decades ago before ELF tookover. Now in 2022 it looks like that a.out code will be removed from the kernel...

Lead Fwupd/LVFS developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released v1.7.4 for this open-souce utility to allow firmware updating on Linux of system motherboards and peripherals...

While we are very eager for Godot 4.0 with everything that this open-source game engine is going to deliver on, Godot 3.5 beta is out today and is a rather nice interim step forward...

KDE has made available the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.24 desktop update ahead of its planned stable release on 8 February...

Samsung in partnership with Tesla has posted a set of 23 patches for enabling Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) SoC for the mainline Linux kernel...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have now committed the DG2/Alchemist graphics card PCI IDs and device information data to Mesa 22.0 for their OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, but for now until the Linux kernel support is baked this is disabled...

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced the DXGKRNL driver as the kernel driver component for supporting GPU accelerated use-cases within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). That original DXGKRNL driver was quickly shot down by upstream kernel developers and various issues raised while now for the past year Microsoft has been reworking this kernel driver and on Wednesday published the new version...

Being worked on since early 2020 by Red Hat's David Howells has been a rewrite to Linux's FS-Cache and CacheFiles code focusing on making it smaller and simpler while also presenting possible memory/performance advantages. That major rewrite has been merged now for Linux 5.17...

Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks...

The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation "SLS" mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow...

Formally announced at CES, the Core i5 12400 and other Alder Lake non-K desktop CPUs are beginning to appear in retail channels. Last week I was able to buy an Intel Core i5 12400 "Alder Lake" from a major Internet retailer for $209 USD -- and one week later there remains availability during these turbulent supply chain times. The i5-12400 has wound up being a very nice processor for Linux use that exceeded my initial expectations.

It's not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17.....