Phoronix

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...

GNU Jami "Taranis" has been released as a major update to this free software project for peer-to-peer communication and SIP-based messaging. GNU Jami is what previously started out as SFLphone and then GNU Ring for initially being focused on softphones...

Another aging Intel motherboard is now supported by Coreboot for those wanting to free your system down to the BIOS...

Just in time for dealing with any holiday photos, Darktable 3.8 is out today as the latest shiny feature update to this open-source RAW photography post-production software...

Intel on Thursday submitted a final drm-intel-gt-next pull of new material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle...

Ogre 2.3 is out for a holiday release as the newest feature release of the Ogre-Next open-source 3D rendering engine code used both for games and applications...

Systemd 250 is the latest major open-source software project release for those trying to get out their releases before year's end... Simply put, systemd 250 is a very big feature release...

Polychromatic as the open-source GUI front-end for working in turn with OpenRazer for configuring Razer peripherals under Linux is out with a new holiday release...

An exciting LLVM development has landed in time for Christmas! Complementary to the LLVM SPIR-V back-end work that could soon be mainlined, Clang has now merged the initial SPIR-V toolchain support. This allows going from Clang to the SPIR-V intermediate representation that is conformant to the OpenCL environment specification -- such as for compiling OpenCL kernels into SPIR-V...

Recently I looked at the macOS 12 performance against Linux when it comes to the Intel-based Macs. Stemming from reader requests and curiosity how Windows would perform in the mix, here are such benchmark results with macOS 12.1, Windows 10, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu 21.10.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.7 Wayland compositor is now available for testing...

Krita is easily one of the best digital painting / 2D animation / raster graphics programs out there for being open-source / free software and today is now even better with the Krita 5.0 release...

For those making use of the GNOME desktop and running a laptop with dual-GPU hybrid graphics, Mutter has landed some fixes that may help if you have been experiencing crashes...

The newest Linux hardware support patches for the kernel revolve around i2c bus sharing support for newer SoCs where the i2c bus is being shared by AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP). This i2c controller is based on common DesignWare IP but new kernel code is being crafted for handling that bus sharing between the kernel and the PSP co-processor...

While not talked about as much as raw performance and other factors, but in the recent testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it was observed that the GNOME Wayland session by default on Ubuntu 21.10 is delivering better battery life / lower power consumption than using the GNOME X.Org session...