Phoronix

Amazon has passed along word that they are hiring for Linux gaming engineers that are experienced in the likes of Valve's DXVK and Proton efforts as well as being experienced with the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Vulkan, and more...

The first alpha release of Weston 10.0 is now available as the next feature update to Wayland's reference compositor...

Canonical is looking to increase the outlook for Ubuntu on FPGAs and has announced a collaborative partnership with Xilinx to get the Linux distribution working on more of their hardware...

Linux PC vendor System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.10 as the newest version of their Ubuntu-based operating system...

For those looking at upgrading your business notebook this holiday season, here are our first benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U mobile processor under Linux using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2. For ~$1299 USD this holiday season on sale, this Linux-friendly ThinkPad offers a lot with the 8-core / 16-thread Zen 3 processor with Vega graphics, 32GB LPDDR4X 4266MHz system memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, 4K IPS display, and legendary ThinkPad build quality.

Given the age of the X.Org/X11 code-base security issues have become quite frequent. It was nearly a decade ago that the X.Org Server was considered a "security disaster" and a security researcher saying it's even worse than it looks. Today another batch of X.Org Server security vulnerabilities have been made public...

While the ETC2 texture compression standard is royalty-free and popular for OpenGL / GLES / Vulkan use, recent AMD Radeon GPUs and APUs have removed their native support for this alternative to the likes of ASTC and S3TC. But now in Mesa 22.0 there is emulated ETC2 support for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver to in turn improve this open-source driver's Android support...

Upstreaming progress is being made on a new "HIPSPV" toolchain for AMD's HIP path so that SPIR-V kernels can be executed and ultimately allowing for execution by OpenCL drivers. This HIPSPV effort driven outside of AMD aims to be able to allow HIP code to work on other GPU drivers such as those from Intel...

Fedora 36 is planning to use plocate as its new provider of the locate command for finding files on file-systems. Plocate should make for even faster locating of files on disk as well as doing so using less CPU cycles...

The latest GCC Git activity for next year's GCC 12 compiler is adding of ARMv8.8-A support...

Fedora 36 feature work continues building up for what will make another exciting update to this Linux distribution come April. The latest approval is more exciting work on the OSTree / CoreOS front...

A minor update to AMD's Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" software is out today for open-source GPU computing...

AMD has issued a nice end-of-year update to the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler (AOCC) that also includes Fortran support as well as a new release of their AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries (AOCL)...

GCC 12 is nearing release in a few months time as the annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection for this Free Software Foundation backed code compiler. On top of new C/C++ language features and various optimization improvements, there is updated tuning for Intel's new Alder Lake processors. Here are some early GCC 11.2 vs. GCC 12 development benchmarks looking at the performance on a Core i5 12600K.

Fwupd 1.7.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software that integrates with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering streamlined system and device firmware updates under Linux...

PipeWire 0.3.41 is out as the newest version of this increasingly-used Linux audio/video stream server solution...

Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD's K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements...

Ubisoft issued a new job posting for a Linux developer, which has many Linux gamers excited especially as it's mentioned for an "unannounced project." Unfortunately, contrary to all the emailed tips in overnight about the job posting, it ultimately will likely prove to be of little interest to the gaming community...

It looks like EXT4 come Linux 5.17 could be making use of the kernel's new mount API. Queued up into EXT4's "dev" branch is transitioning the EXT4 file-system driver to using the kernel's modern mount API...

AMD's "RDNA" class GPUs support wavefront sizes of 32 and 64 compared to older GCN GPUs at 64 threads. Going back to 2019 RadeonSI began making use of Wave32 for some shaders but now for Mesa 22.0 next quarter there are greater Wave32 improvements that have landed...