Phoronix

Intel's CM Compiler is out with its first big update since earlier in the year for advancing their "C For Metal" GPU programming language effort...

Somewhat of a surprising change with Intel Gen12.5 graphics is that they have removed the hardware supporting Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). Intel's Linux graphics driver has now been updated to address Gen12.5+ foregoing hardware support for ASTC texture compression...

The GNU toolchain (initially with the GNU Assembler) has begun landing support for RISC-V's Zbs instructions that are part of the Bitmanip extension to the processor ISA...

For the better part of the past decade Google has been pursuing performance improvements to their Chrome/Chromium web browser as the "RenderingNG" initiative to provide faster web page performance, lower memory consumption, and better battery life. This current work is finally wrapping up in 2021 to great success...

NVIDIA today published their newest Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux with some new extension support plus Vulkan Video enhancements...

FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware...

Next month's release of Chrome 96 is a bit more exciting now thanks to the work of Jan Grulich at Red Hat...

Red Hat today made available the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 (RHEL 8.5) beta, incorporating a half-year of improvements to this flagship enterprise Linux distribution...

Canonical today announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame, its full-screen shell built atop the Wayland-embracing Mir server for embedded displays, IoT, and related use-cases...

For those wondering how AMD's latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series is competing now between the Linux driver options of AMD's official Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 "PRO" driver stack and the latest upstream, fully open-source driver components from Mesa and the mainline Linux kernel, here is a fresh comparison.

A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...

At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions...

We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware...

One of our favorite open-source game projects, ET: Legacy for letting the legendary game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on as a community project, is out with a new release...

The Asahi Linux project that has been working nearly the past year on bringing up Apple M1 support under Linux has issued their September 2021 porting and reverse engineering report...

In Linux 5.14 Intel introduced initial Alder Lake P enablement driver support including around the new "XeLPD" display block. With Linux 5.15 there was the initial enablement around DG2/Alchemist graphics. Now for Linux 5.16 is a significant amount of new driver code for actually getting the display support into shape for both DG2 and ADL-P...

Coming with the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle will be support for RISC-V virtualization with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)...

Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS...

As reported on last week, an updated Zstd implementation for the Linux kernel is being re-attempted by Zstd developer Nick Terrell at Facebook. Today he sent out the latest Zstd kernel patches to provide a much newer version of the code compared to what is currently mainlined and will provide much better performance and numerous fixes...

Canonical continues advancing their Wayland-based Mir stack for embedded and IoT use-cases. Out today is Mir 2.5 with the latest features as they work to provide better support for on-screen keyboards...