Phoronix

Making a Sunday debut are the amd-pstate v6 patches as the latest iteration of this work for improving the AMD CPU frequency control behavior on Linux for more optimized power efficiency with modern Zen 2 / Zen 3 series (and future) processors...

Thanks to the reverse-engineering, open-source community there has been mainline Linux driver support for select NZXT all-in-one water cooling solutions while for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel is another new NZXT driver for some of their other products...

Last year with Linux 5.10 FUSE added DAX support for use with VirtIO-FS. Like with DAX for other file-systems, enabling this direct access mode allows bypassing the page cache. For use-cases when running on persistent memory like devices or VirtIO, having this direct access to the storage device can be beneficial for performance. With Linux 5.17 FUSE is expanding the DAX support to allow per-inode control as well...

Due to changes with the upstream GRUB 2.06 bootloader, Ubuntu developers are figuring out how they are going to be managing dual-boot/multi-boot scenarios moving forward with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

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...