Phoronix

While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too...

Back in September Intel originally posted Linux patches for "Software Defined Silicon" for being able to activate extra CPU features present in the processor's silicon but not exposed by default unless the cryptographically secure process with this SDSi driver was performed. Intel appears to be moving toward allowing licensable processor features that can be activated after the fact and today a new version of that SDSi Linux driver appeared...

AWS recently introduced Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form as the latest iteration of their Linux distribution now based on Fedora with various alterations to catering to their customers running it on EC2. Last week were benchmarks looking at Amazon Linux 2022 compared to Amazon Linux 2 and other distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu. In this article we are seeing how Amazon Linux 2022 can compete with Intel's own Clear Linux performance-optimized distribution.

Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!..

The Linux Foundation known for hosting numerous open-source projects and stewarding the Linux kernel, organizing countless events, and employing various LF Fellows such as Linux Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman has published their 2021 report...

The LLVM compiler infrastructure supports not only a growing number of CPU architectures but continues to lead when it comes to its support for different accelerators. Back in 2019 NEC was working to upstream their SX-Aurora VE "Vector Engine" Accelerator and now as of this week that target is considered officially supported upstream...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year...

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions...

Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline...

The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm's "Midgard" and "Bifrost" architectures while the newer "Valhall" architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway...

With Imagination Technologies having sold off what was MIPS Technologies several years ago and that CPU architecture having been abandoned now, Imagination today announced "Catapult" as their new family of RISC-V processor IP...

While the performance of LLVM/Clang has improved a lot over the years and for x86_64 and AArch64 can be neck-and-neck with the GCC compiler, the fierce performance battle is not over. With LLVM/Clang 14.0 due out in the early months of 2022 will be more performance work with one recent commit in particular showing a lot of promise...

In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined. Sent out this morning were the updated patches introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel...

Last week marked the debut of the highly anticipated Blender 3.0 open-source 3D modeling software. Since then I have been very busy putting Blender 3.0 through its paces with a lot of performance benchmarking across various CPUs and GPUs.

Mozilla Firefox 95.0 is now available for download ahead of its official release tomorrow. Making this new version interesting is the RLBox integration...

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package...

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension...

It's been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD's defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday's release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4...

OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun's OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022...