Phoronix

Intel passed along news today of their development efforts around Universal Scalable Firmware, a new initiative they are pursuing to simplify and scale firmware development for hardware from edge computing devices to the cloud...

Back in the day Ubuntu's Wiki was a great resource for Linux documentation but less so these days while the Arch Linux Wiki is often viewed as a gold standard for open-source documentation. Canonical though is now hoping to radically improve the documentation for Ubuntu and its other software offerings...

Following the news from last week of experimental Zink code running Wayland's Weston compositor over this Mesa-based OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has opened up about some of the ongoing work to improve the efficiency of Zink and making such advancements a reality...

The Linux 5.17 kernel next year will support temperature monitoring for a "new generation" of AMD Zen processors...

NVIDIA is looking to enable run-time power management for the VFIO PCI Linux driver to allow for better power-savings...

Back in 2018 Intel founded Sound Open Firmware as their effort to provide an open-source audio DSP firmware and software development kit. AMD has begun supporting Sound Open Firmware too now, initially for the Renoir audio co-processor (ACP)...

Last week Google engineers uncovered a reference count underflow issue affecting all Linux kernels going back to v4.14 in 2017. This issue led to memory leaking from one process to another and only uncovered by accident. To address this class of memory corruption issues moving forward, Google is proposing a new "Page Table Check" feature moving forward...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, CentOS Linux 8 version 2111 has been released as its RHEL 8.5 rebuild. This comes ahead of CentOS 8 becoming end-of-life at year's end...

Vulkan 1.2.199 is out with another new extension driven as part of Valve's work around Steam Play (Proton) and the Direct3D over Vulkan efforts...

Along with introducing DLSS 2.3 today, NVIDIA is making public an open-source Image Scaling SDK with promised cross-platform GPU support...

While the Linux 5.16 merge window just ended and that kernel won't be out until the tail end of the calendar year, already for Linux 5.17 new material is beginning to accumulate in the respective subsystem development trees... One set of changes merged this morning from Google can provide a sizable performance win around TCP performance in the datacenter...

AMD released AOMP 14.0 during SC21 week as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang-based compiler providing OpenMP GPU offload support for Radeon graphics processors...

For over four years now Red Hat has been working on Stratis as their new Linux storage solution. As an alternative to shifting to newer file-systems like Btrfs or the controversial OpenZFS, Stratis has been about offering similar advanced Linux storage features while building atop LVM, DeviceMapper and XFS all while using the modern Rust programming language. Stratis Storage 3.0 is now available as the latest work on this front...

Currently when running Linux distributions within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), systemd isn't used but that could soon be changing at least for Ubuntu...

Besides the efforts out there for implementing the likes of Direct3D, OpenCL, and OpenGL on top of Vulkan, there does still exist the hobbyist project for implementing AMD's Mantle API atop Vulkan for which the Khronos API was originally based. A new Vulkan extension is now being proposed to help in that Mantle-on-Vulkan effort...

As expected GCC 12 has now entered its "stage 3" development phase where the free software developers involved will focus on bug fixing rather than landing shiny new features...

Mesa 22.0 development code now has basic support in the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for OpenCL powered by the Clover state tracker...

The FreeBSD project has published their latest quarterly status report highlighting the work achieved on this open-source BSD operating system. Even with the pandemic and limitations on physical events, the FreeBSD developers continue making significant progress on their goals and technology road-map...

It's crazy to think it has already been ten years since Arm disclosed ARMv8 with 64-bit support. Given the success of ARMv8 (and Armv9 now on the way) and there not being much in the way of useful ARMv7 hardware in recent years and the like, Fedora has drafted plans for retiring its ARMv7 support...

The Lightweight Java Game Library "LWJGL" has seen its first release in more than two years for this library that provides bindings for a number of different native APIs. With not seeing a release since before the pandemic, there is a lot in store with today's LWJGL 3.3 release...