Phoronix

Coming as a surprise to end out the week is confirmation that the lead developer and architect for Intel's Linux Vulkan driver has left the company...

Debian 11.2 is out today as the newest point release to "Bullseye" that premiered earlier this year...

Display support for the Mediatek MT8192 SoC is expected to land for the upcoming Linux 5.17 SoC...

While there hasn't been much to talk about Unigine recently when it comes to Linux games and they seem to place less emphasis these days on Unigine as a game engine, this cross-platform SDK/engine continues to be visually quite stunning, their Linux support remains in good shape, and they appear to be enjoying very successful efforts on the commercial simulation side. Unigine 2.15 was released this week as the latest iteration of their engine...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system developed by the community with an aim for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows is out with a big update. The last release was ReactOS 0.4.13 all the way back in April 2020 while this week has been succeeded by the big ReactOS 0.4.14 update...

The ENQCMD functionality that is part of Intel's Data Streaming Accelerator with upcoming Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors was disabled earlier this year for being "broken beyond repair". But now ahead of Sapphire Rapids beginning to ramp up in the coming months, Intel open-source engineers believe they have improved the code that the ENQCMD instruction usage could be re-enabled for the Linux kernel...

KDE Wayland users have many reasons to be grateful this Christmas with yet more improvements having landed for the Plasma Wayland session. Plus KDE's Konsole terminal emulator can now scroll about twice as fast as previously...

While now half-way through December, Microsoft today published their November 2021 update to CBL-Mariner 1.0, their in-house Linux distribution...

With Wine 7.0 gearing up for release in January, since last week we have been under a feature freeze and weekly release candidates. Wine 7.0-rc2 is out now with more fixes in battening up this next open-source release for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux / macOS / BSDs...

After the open-source NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver changes intended for Linux 5.16 weren't pulled due to timing, they are back around for Linux 5.17 with most notably the open-source Tegra driver feature pull request introducing NVDEC video decoding...

It's been a while since last comparing the Apple macOS performance to Linux since in part because the newer Apple Silicon (M1) hardware isn't yet in good enough shape for performance tests on Linux. But for those wondering about the Intel-powered Macs and how the performance of the latest Linux distributions compare to that of macOS 12 Monterey, here are some benchmarks of the new macOS 12.1 up against Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Intel's own Clear Linux.

Following the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 Windows driver that released earlier in the month, this week brought the similar quarterly enterprise graphics driver update to Linux...

Since early 2020 Micron went public with HSE as an open-source storage engine for SSDs and persistent memory. The HSE key-value store proved to be extremely performant with the likes of a MongoDB implementation but required changes to the Linux kernel that made it initially a higher barrier for entry. HSE 2.0 shipped in October that no longer required those kernel changes while still offering blistering fast performance. Now to round out the year they have HSE 2.1...

After being more than ten years in the making after being started by Fujitsu engineers in 2008 but never going through all the steps for upstreaming, thanks to a SUSE engineer the Linux 5.17 kernel will finally have the Xen USB virtual host driver...

Not only is Loongson working on bringing up LoongArch ISA support for the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components, but the Chinese company has now laid out their plans for LoongArch on LLVM...

After introducing a lot of new AMDGPU feature code in prior weeks to DRM-Next for introduction with Linux 5.17, AMD developers have shifted their DRM-Next focus now onto driver fixes ahead of this next kernel cycle...

Following the Richard Stallman situation, board members leaving, projects seeking greater transparency from the FSF, and other issues within the Free Software Foundation the past two years, the FSF has finally adopted a new governance framework for board members...

Already a lot of DRM display/graphics driver changes have been queued into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window while now is the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next material. DRM-Misc maintainer Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE commented, "every single patchset in this [pull request] is awesome."..

When it comes to the Radeon ROCm GPU software support AMD only officially supports it on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, RHEL / CentOS, and Ubuntu LTS releases. But Arch Linux already makes it fairly easy to deploy with their third-party packages and now Fedora and Debian have developers also eyeing possible packaging of the Radeon Open eCosystem software for more easily deploying on those distributions...

AMD has made public the AMD Accelerator Cloud. No, they aren't getting into the cloud game per se, but rather allowing a place for customers to try out new EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators running with the latest ROCm software components...