Phoronix

The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17...

It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have kicked off 2022 into full-swing with new features and other improvements now on their way to the next round of KDE software releases...

Adding to the changes for GNOME 42 this spring is the Mutter Wayland compositor now taking into account sub-surfaces when determining direct scanout capabilities...

Gentoo Linux developers were very busy over the course of 2021 for this popular rolling-release operating system choice...

Wine 7.0-rc5 is available for testing while the stable release of Wine 7.0.0 will be popped soon...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window doesn't open up until next week following Sunday's Linux 5.16 stable debut, due to lead Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie going on holiday next week he has sent out the feature pull early. Here is a look at the many GPU/display driver updates for this next kernel version...

Across dozens of articles over the past year I have covered a variety of different open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver optimizations from their kernel driver through their Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the popular RADV Vulkan driver, among other interesting open-source AMD contributions. For those wondering what the cumulative gain was for 2021 from all these AMD graphics driver changes, here are some end-of-year 2020 vs. 2021 benchmarks across a number of different Linux games while testing on Vega, Navi, and Navi 2 graphics cards.

A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture...

As part of the plethora of networking changes for Linux 5.17, NVIDIA is introducing support for Spectrum-4 networking ASICs...

Microsoft had a wild 2021 with Linux/open-source contributions and now days into 2022 we are already seeing more of their Mesa feature work as they look to further advance the capabilities of their Direct3D 12 back-end for running OpenGL/OpenCL atop native Windows D3D12 drivers...

We are closing in on the release of Wine 7.0 as the annual stable feature release for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, BSDs, and other platforms. Here is a recap of the many changes being introduced since last year's Wine 6.0 milestone...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window hasn't opened up yet, there have been a few early pull requests sent out this week ahead of this imminent next kernel cycle. One of those already sent out is the ARM64/AArch64 CPU architecture code updates for Linux 5.17...

Ahead of the Linux 5.17 merge window officially opening next week, random (RNG) subsystem maintainer Jason Donenfeld has submitted an exciting batch of updates for this next kernel cycle...

With starting a new year, it's an interesting time to take a fresh look at how the latest Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers are competing on the Linux desktop...

Helping make PipeWire suitable for the Linux desktop so quickly has been WirePlumber as a more featureful alternative to PipeWire's default session manager. Out today is WirePlumber 0.4.6 as the latest step forward on that front...

After a quiet holiday period the Linux 5.16 kernel is set to be introduced as stable this Sunday. Here is a look at the sixteen most exciting features to find with Linux 5.16...

As part of the various end-of-year Linux comparisons that I've made a habit of over the past 17 years, with the EOY 2021 benchmarking I was rather curious to see how Intel's Clear Linux distribution has evolved Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance since that platform launched in Q2'2021. It turns out there have been some terrific optimizations squeezed out of that latest-generation Xeon Scalable platform on Intel's Clear Linux. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu and Clear Linux performance on the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P reference server back around the time Ice Lake launched and then again using the latest software packages that closed out 2021.

For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...

In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline...