Phoronix

Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available...

KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations...

It's now another year in the books and in just six months and a few days will mark 18 years since starting Phoronix.com and 14 years of developing the public, open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software...

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.

GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit...

Thanks to Valve engineer Timur Kristóf and other open-source developers involved, Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is ending 2021 on a high note: mesh shaders was just merged!..

Today is the unfortunate day marking CentOS Linux 8 reaching end-of-life status as a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8...

Arch Linux had a pretty great year with introducing "Archinstall" as part of the official install media as a new, optional installer for conveniently installing the distribution to Valve choosing Arch Linux as their new SteamOS 3.0 base that will power their forthcoming Steam Deck handheld game console...

For those running Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle is set to bring a few improvements to the "thinkpad_acpi" driver...

It was just this month that Mold 1.0 premiered as a very promising, high performance linker alternative to GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers. GCC 12 added support for Mold this week and now for ending out the year Mold 1.0.1 has been released...

Each year it's interesting to see how Microsoft's usage and contributions around Linux and open-source evolve. In a short period of time they go from sponsoring coffee at LinuxTag to enabling .NET and more on Linux to now in 2021 having made public their CBL-Mariner Linux distribution, supporting more features like eBPF and IO_uring on Windows, and continue heavily investing in the Windows Subsystem for Linux...

Merged yesterday into the LibreOffice code-base was introducing yet another graphics drawing back-end for this open-source office suite...

Back in late 2020 Intel's programming manuals detailed the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface for the CPU to provide guidance to the kernel's scheduler on optimal task placement of workloads. While marketed as Thread Director with the new 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, that hardware feedback interface support is getting squared away for the Linux kernel to improve the support for these newest processors...

Queued today within the Linux's random.git repository for the /dev/random and /dev/urandom code is support for using BLAKE2s rather than SHA1 when hashing the entropy pool. This in turn is a big performance speed-up in addition to being more secure...

Fedora had another successful year and anecdotally enthusiasm around the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution grew a lot this year among Linux power users. As has been the case for years, Fedora releases have been among the first to feature new Linux innovations from the desktop down the stack -- many of which have been spearheaded by Red Hat engineers. Helping its cause for the past several years is that they have managed to deliver releases on-time (or close to it) and haven't been like some of the past distant releases that were rather buggy and other headaches stemming from the constant flow of changes. Fedora 34 and Fedora 35 this year were great releases and continued pushing the distribution on an upward trajectory...

With a few lines of changed code updating some parameters, AMD Radeon graphics processors having the VCE video encoder block will be able to enjoy better performance...

AMD this week released AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their last open-source Vulkan driver version of the year and with it came finally fixing the poor performance seen by that driver when running under Wayland such as with Ubuntu 21.04 and newer. Indeed, my tests have confirmed the AMDVLK performance now being in far better shape under Wayland, but is it enough to better compete now with Mesa's RADV alternative Vulkan driver? Here are fresh benchmarks.

Ubuntu and parent company Canonical had another great year not only on the Linux desktop but continuing its commercial successes around the server, cloud, and IoT sectors too. Ubuntu 21.04 and 21.10 delivered new features across all fronts this year and developers are now busy preparing for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release next spring...

As one of the last major feature changes heading into Mesa Git this calendar year, RadeonSI Gallium3D as the open-source OpenGL driver for modern AMD Radeon GPUs there is now sparse texture support...

It was another exciting year for Intel on the open-source/Linux front with countless contributions to the Linux kernel, Mesa, and other open-source projects. Intel's oneAPI toolkits continue humming along and they continue maintaining tons of other projects from Clear Linux to SVT-AV1 to IWD and many more. Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have also been extremely busy preparing the open-source support for next year's discrete GPU launches. Here is a look at the most popular Intel articles on Phoronix during the course of 2021...