Phoronix

Along with the broader industry trend of transitioning security-sensitive code to memory-safe languages like Rust, there has been an effort to write a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils. For nearly a year that Rust Coreutils has been able to run a basic Debian system while more recently they have been increasing their level of GNU Coreutils compatibility and in some cases now even outperforming the upstream project...

Prominent Mesa developer Jason Ekstrand who formerly led Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver effort and being one of their open-source driver developers originally involved with the NIR intermediate representation work wrote a detailed and excellent blog post outlining its successes eight years running. While it still gets brought up into discussions from time to time (including quite recently stemming from a RISC-V graphics thread) why Mesa doesn't use LLVM IR or SPIR-V directly as its intermediate representation, NIR continues as a striking success and used by all major Mesa drivers...

Back in summer 2020 was a proposal for Zstd-compressed Linux firmware so that the growing number of firmware binaries shipped by the linux-firmware tree could be Zstd-compressed to save disk space while being able to more quickly decompressed the data compared to other firmware compression options...

Along with Wine 7.1 releasing on Friday, Wine-Staging 7.1 is also available as the more bleeding-edge version of Wine that carries more than five huundred extra patches atop the code-base...

KDE developers have been very busy this month working up to the Plasma 5.24 LTS release in February. Plus with the 15 minute bug initiative underway and working to address remaining issues with the Plasma Wayland session, it's been a busy start of 2022...

In addition to this week bringing Oracle's GraalVM 22.0 release, Eclipse has released OpenJ9 0.30 as the latest version of their open-source Java Virtual Machine (JVM)...

Version 1.16 of the Basis universal GPU texture codec developed by well known developer Rich Geldreich's Binomial LLC...

With Wine 7.0 having been released, the code freeze is over and we are now onto the Wine 7.x bi-weekly development releases that will then culminate with the Wine 8.0 stable release one year from now. In kicking off the new development series, Wine 7.1 is out today...

DXVK-NVAPI as the open-source project implementing support for NVIDIA's NVAPI within the realm of DXVK is out with a new release, which is exciting for NVIDIA Linux gamers...

Wayland Protocols 1.25 was released today as the collection of testing and stable Wayland protocols. New to Wayland Protocols 1.25 is the session-lock-v1 protocol being experimental and responsible to handle session locking...

The first release candidate of GStreamer 1.20 is now available for testing of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

Ahead of the Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards shipping this year, Intel's open-source developers have continued ironing out the Linux driver support. The most recent kernel patches are for getting their Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support in order...

Wasmer 2.2-rc1 is out today as the WebAssembly run-tme to "run any code on any client" with its broad platform coverage and allowing numerous programming languages from Rust to PHP to C# being able to be compiled into WebAssembly and then running on any OS or embedded into other languages for execution...

JEDEC has published the JESD238 HBM3 standard as the next version for High Bandwidth Memory...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will likely do away with the Ubuntu/Canonical Partner Archive where their software partners could upload select proprietary/binary-only software for easy access by Ubuntu users...

The Arm Mali Valhall architecture reverse-engineering started last summer and while limited in the reverse engineering capabilities for several months, it looks like by this summer we'll hopefully see a working driver for Arm's newer graphics IP...

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router software stack forked from pfSense, is out with its first major release of 2022...

The first set of feature updates have been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle begins around the end of March...

In addition to closing in on the Godot 4.0 release, another equally exciting effort in the open-source game engine space is the Open 3D Engine originally from the Amazon Lumberyard code and backed by the Linux Foundation and other organizations. Open 3D Engine 2111.2 is out today as the newest stable point release for this less than one year old open-source game engine effort...

As expected, Intel's open-source "ANV" driver is ready to go with Vulkan 1.3 for Mesa 22.0...