Phoronix

AMD's official Vulkan driver team is ending out the year by pushing out AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver implementation for Linux systems. This alternative to the Mesa RADV driver finally has fixed up its very poor performance for Vulkan under Wayland...

Carsten Haitzler released a new version of the Enlightenment window manager / shell (and Wayland compositor) for Christmas. Various Enlightenment components have also seen new releases...

It was nearly four years ago already that Intel announced Sound Open Firmware in pushing for open-source sound firmware for their hardware. The Sound Open Firmware effort has been a great success even if it's not a shiny project widely talked about among consumers. Just prior to the holidays Sound Open Firmware 2.0 was quietly released...

When it comes to the Motorola 68000 "m68k" virtual machine targets, the most powerful option under Linux right now is the Quadra 800. That though for virtualization purposes isn't too useful by today's standards with being limited to 1GB of RAM and limited interface support. But a new Virtual M68k Machine aims to provide a more useful target and support has already landed in QEMU while the Linux kernel support is pending...

The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there...

Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.16-rc7 today as the newest weekly test candidate while the official Linux 5.16 stable release should happen in two weeks...

Another important step toward Apple M1 hardware being useful under Linux is in the process of being realized... Working WiFi. The initial "request for comments" patch series was sent out today enabling the Broadcom "BRCMFMAC" driver to work for the wireless LAN support on the M1 SoC as well as with the Apple T2 platforms...

While off the usual Friday release regiment due to the Christmas holidays, Wine 7.0-rc3 was released minutes ago as the newest test release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux...

As we approach the end of the year, here is a look back at some of the Mesa open-source 3D OpenGL/Vulkan driver development statistics for 2021 compared to prior years as well as a look at the top contributors to this crucial piece of the Linux desktop stack...

It's been nearly two years in the making since Intel posted FGKASLR patches for improving Linux kernel security. While that work on Finer Grained / Function Granular KASLR stalled for a year, in recent months work on it was revived and in 2022 looks like this security is on a path for mainlining...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.8 is out as the latest quarterly feature update to our open-source, automated and cross-platform benchmarking software...

Lumina is the desktop project originally started by PC-BSD/TrueOS developers as a BSD-focused desktop environment built atop Qt. When TrueOS stopped focusing on being a great desktop BSD, Lumina development stalled. But for Linux and BSD users fond of this lightweight Qt desktop, Lumina Desktop development restarted a few months ago...

Another open-source project releasing on Christmas is LuxCoreRender 2.6 as a sizable feature update incorporating the better part of a year's worth of improvements to this physically based rendering software...

The latest KDE weekly development summary is out that notes all of the fixes and improvements made during Christmas week...

Ruby 3.1 is out this Christmas day as a big feature release for this programming language while retaining compatibility with Ruby 3.0...

KiCad 6.0 has been tagged as a major update to this leading open-source printed circuit board design program...

It's been a while since last having anything major to report on the Etnaviv Linux driver stack reporting open-source support Vivante graphics IP. With Linux 5.17 is an important step forward with the driver now behaving properly for IOMMU-enabled systems...

AMD on Christmas Eve posted their seventh iteration of the AMD P-State Linux driver as their new CPU frequency scaling solution for Zen 2+ to make use of ACPI CPPC for ultimately striving toward optimal power efficiency with a focus on mobile and desktop systems...

For those making use of integrated Radeon Vega-based graphics with modern Ryzen laptops at least, the Linux 5.16 kernel is offering some nice performance gains noticed recently as part of the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U benchmarking with the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. Here is a look at the AMD Radeon Graphics performance for that Zen 3 laptop across varying Mesa and Linux kernel versions while then expanding the comparison to multiple devices given the Linux 5.16 performance boost.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and/or cheers to any end-of-year celebrations you may partake in. The daily original content on Phoronix will continue each day just as it has been for years without any single day interruption but there is also a holiday Phoronix Premium special for those wanting to help cap off 2021 and help ensure a successful 2022 for continued Linux benchmarking, performance testing, hardware reviews, and open-source news...