Phoronix

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...

OpenRGB 0.7 is out as the newest feature release for this vendor-independent software that provides for RGB lighting controls for many different devices/brands and works across Linux / macOS / Windows...

In preparing for an exciting 2022, the OBS Studio open-source software that is popular with game streamers and for other screencasting purposes, is out with its first beta of OBS Studio 27.2. This next update to OBS Studio is bringing some exciting improvements for this leading cross-platform streaming solution...

For those sticking to stable Mesa point releases, Mesa 21.3.3 is out today to close out the year. Notable with Mesa 21.3.3 is the large number of fixes for older ATI Radeon R300 through R500 (X1000 series) GPU fixes with the R300 Gallium3D driver...

A small but noteworthy change that landed today for the GCC 12 compiler itself is support for using the Mold linker...

Fedora is often on the bleeding-edge of changes for tier-one Linux distributions but not all of them are very technical in nature but sometimes just cosmetic alterations. Among the latest batch of change proposals for next spring's Fedora 36 is to change the default font...

Earlier this month AMD released AOCC 3.2 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler focused on delivering optimized Zen performance. With our initial AMD AOCC 3.2 benchmarks on Zen 3, there is nice incremental improvement compared to the prior 3.x releases. But how does this AMD-optimized compiler stack up against the upstream LLVM Clang and GCC compilers? Here is a look at the AMD AOCC performance against the current Clang and GCC C/C++ compilers.

For those with systems making use of an Intel "Titan Ridge" Thunderbolt 3 controller, a Linux kernel driver improvement working its way to mainline should yield thermal/power benefits...

Last year there was some work for getting Gallium3D Zink working on macOS for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to in turn run it atop the MoltenVK library for translating the Vulkan calls to Apple's Metal graphics/compute API. That work fell into disrepair but now the fixed up code for allowing Zink to build on Apple's operating system has been merged into Mesa 22.0...

As part of our various year-end articles, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the year with the many milestones they achieved in ramping up their support both for desktop/mobile and server hardware and continued successes when it comes to their open-source Radeon graphics driver stack...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver providing the open-source kernel display/graphics support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has ready its batch of changes for DRM-Next to appear in Linux 5.17...

Intel open-source engineers have prepared "PFRUT" support for Platform Firmware Runtime Updates for allowing (U)EFI capsule updates to be performed on capable systems without rebooting the system in order to eliminate downtime...

Queued into the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle are some Alder Lake audio updates...

As we hit the end of 2021 for those wondering about the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland gaming performance difference for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver stack and desktops on Ubuntu 21.10.

With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year...

Microsoft continues improving the Gallium3D Direct3D 12 path within Mesa for getting more of OpenGL running atop it on Windows...