Phoronix

Coreboot 4.15 was tagged today as the latest advertised version of this open-source firmware implementation for systems. With this new version are 21 additional laptops and motherboards supported...

While many Linux users were excited years ago around EOMA68 and in part the possibility of an open, upgradeable laptop design, it has yet to ship and looking like it never will -- not to mention being very outdated specifications by today's standards. Entirely unrelated to that prior upgradeable hardware effort but continuing in similar goals is The Framework Laptop. The Framework Laptop is a thin, upgradeable notebook that is Linux-friendly and allows the user to easily upgrade their own components. I was testing The Framework Laptop for a while and from the hardware perspective is a very nice device and running well under Linux.

Over the past nearly two decades Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been known as an initiative for getting students involved with open-source software development over the course of a summer while receiving a stipend/grant from Google. Beginning next year, GSoC will no longer be limited to students but open to all adults. Additionally, other changes are also coming...

Valve just sent out an email to pre-order customers that the Steam Deck release is being delayed by two months...

While since the end of October there has been NVIDIA 495.44 as the stable 495 series driver beta for Linux users, out today is their v470.86 release for those using that older long-term support branch...

The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit wrapped up yesterday with interesting talks on this open-source, cross-platform ZFS file-system implementation...

For fans of Jolla's Linux-based smartphone platform, Sailfish OS 4.3 "Suomenlinna" is out today...

Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface...

Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022...

Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas...

While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...

Merged last week into the Linux 5.16 kernel is improved Retpoline "return trampoline" code...

HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed...

Recently I ran benchmarks showing how Ubuntu 21.10 performance has improved for AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" even compared to just six months ago with Ubuntu 21.04. In this article is a broader look at AMD EPYC Milan on the autumn 2021 Linux distributions with firing up not only Ubuntu 21.10 but Fedora Server 35, Clear Linux 35150, CentOS Stream, and AlmaLinux 8.4 as other common alternatives in the Linux server space.

Xen para-virtualized guests booting on the Linux 5.16 kernel should see noticeably quicker boot times...

Intel's open-source Linux engineers continue to be quite busy bringing up CXL interconnect support within the mainline kernel. For the in-development Linux 5.16 is another batch of code landing...

As of this morning the GCC 12 compiler has landed support for -march=armv9-a for targeting the forthcoming Armv9-A ISA...

A new version of the Ncurses text-based user interface library is now available and most notable is a new but experimental driver for supporting the Windows Terminal...

Being worked on for more than a year by Intel and other kernel developers has been FGKASLR to enhance kernel security. While the Linux kernel has long supported Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to make memory addresses less predictable, FGKASLR ups the security much more by placing that randomization at the function level. It's looking like FGKASLR could be mainlined soon...

NVIDIA used their GTC event today to announce OptiX 7.4 as the latest version of their ray-tracing engine/framework for use with their GPUs...