Phoronix

With GCC 12 having added a new option to enable Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86/x86_64 CPUs, Linux kernel developers are preparing to enable this new compiler feature for further reducing undesirable speculation exposure...

Wine 6.22 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms like macOS and FreeBSD. Wine 6.22 brings more improvements while the Wine 7.0 stable release is inching closer...

Box86 as the open-source project to run Linux x86 binaries on other CPU architectures like ARM is out with a new feature release along with the accompanying Box64 project for x86_64 treatment. With today's Box86 update is even expanded Vulkan support now good enough for handling DXVK...

Following experimental Zink work to improve the NVIDIA driver support as part of the broader Copper initiative that also allows running Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for Wayland's Weston compositor, another milestone has now been reached...

There is a patch pending that improves the Linux kernel's dealing with the hybrid P and E cores found with Intel's new Alder Lake processors that will benefit some systems/motherboards...

A fourth iteration of the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver patches for Linux have been sent out for review and testing...

FWUPD 1.7.2 is out as the latest release of this leading open-source solution for handling firmware updates under Linux for devices from motherboard UEFI to peripheral firmware...

OpenCL 3.0.10 has been tagged as the newest revision to the OpenCL 3.0 API...

Intel last month open-sourced "ControlFlag" for finding bugs within source code by using AI with training off more than a reported one billion lines of code. Intel has said they have successfully been using it within their software from applications down to firmware. The new milestone today is ControlFlag 1.0 being released...

Earlier this month I provided benchmarks showing the Intel UHD Graphics 770 with Alder Lake compared to other CPUs/APUs under Linux. Those tests were done with the latest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver code at the time, but for those running Alder Lake and wondering if it's worthwhile moving from the stable versions to more bleeding-edge components, this article is for you.

With Chrome 96 released, Google has now promoted Chrome 97 to beta as the next iteration of their web browser...

The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year...

The latest Zink development code paired with the forthcoming "Copper" work is yielding an OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation that when running on NVIDIA's proprietary Vulkan driver is even able to outperform NVIDIA's own proprietary OpenGL driver for at least one notable Linux game...

Prominent FFmpeg developer Cyanreg has begun working on an experimental Vulkan hardware acceleration video decoder for FFmpeg...

The open-source Nouveau driver's support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" series remains very limited -- most notably, without any 3D acceleration support -- but now the GA106 GPU can light up for the GeForce RTX 3060...

Last month I reported on activity around Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86_64 CPUs, similar to the work carried out by Arm last year on their SLS vulnerability. That work on the x86 (x86_64 inclusive) side has now been merged to GCC 12 Git and a kernel patch is expected to come shortly that will flip it on as the latest CPU security protection...

After nearly a decade of Slackware 14, the Slackware 15.0 release is moving closer to debut and now effectively under a hard feature freeze...

NVIDIA today released their latest Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux...

Mesa 21.3 is now out as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source graphics drivers...

The recently-ended Linux 5.16 merge window saw significant I/O improvements driven primarily by maintainer Jens Axboe's recent focus on relentlessly optimizing the block and IO_uring code for record-setting per-core IOPS. As good as those improvements are, Linux 5.17 should be even better...