Phoronix

While not talked about as much as raw performance and other factors, but in the recent testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it was observed that the GNOME Wayland session by default on Ubuntu 21.10 is delivering better battery life / lower power consumption than using the GNOME X.Org session...

Well known open-source video game SuperTux that is inspired by Super Mario Bros is out with its first release in one and a half years for the Tux-themed platform game...

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is out with version 21.2 "Qonos" ahead of the holidays in offering some nice incremental updates for this popular enthusiast distribution...

For those wanting to pickup some new games to enjoy around the holidays and/or expand your game collection ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship next quarter, Valve's Winter Sale is now underway...

While the VKD3D-Proton fork has been very active and running an increasing number of Direct3D 12 Windows games well as part of Valve's Steam Play, CodeWeavers and the upstream Wine community does continue working on VKD3D. CodeWeavers is planning to make big improvements to VKD3D in 2022 to offer better DirectX 12 support with their commercial CrossOver software for Linux and macOS...

Intel has now made their oneAPI Toolkits 2022 release publicly available after announcing it earlier this quarter...

Released earlier this month was AMD's AOCC 3.2 compiler based on LLVM/Clang/Flang that provides optimized support for AMD Zen processors. I've been running some benchmarks of AOCC 3.2 compared to prior AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler releases and this newest release has been helpful in squeezing a bit more out of Zen 3.

Linux 5.17 will have a seemingly important fix for upcoming Intel Alder Lake mobile processors. Without this change/fix, you might not see the advertised one-core turbo frequencies being met for your processor depending upon the system and whether tuning your EPP...

Intel's open-source IWD modern wireless daemon that works with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and their own ConnMan has been preparing support for WiFi Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP)...

Sent out last month were an early set of patches working on IO_uring zero-copy send support for the networking subsystem. This work to boost the throughput potential has evolved now into a second revision of the patches and continues looking very promising...

GIMP 3.0 still isn't ready for release and won't be in 2021 but the GIMP 2.10.30 release is out today in time for working on your Christmas photos or holiday cards...

With the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 powered by the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U prior to blowing the default Microsoft Windows installation on the device I ran some benchmarks for seeing how the performance stacks up against various Linux distributions. Going up against Windows 11 on this AMD Zen 3 laptop were Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Arch Linux.

AMD's Yellow Carp enablement has been going back to early summer for this next-generation APU that is better known as Rembrandt for the Ryzen 6000 mobile series. While there has already been the graphics support to land, sensor support, and various other functionality, only coming now with the next kernel cycle will be Ethernet support...

The open-source Broadcom "V3DV" Vulkan driver within Mesa that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi can now run on Android...

Zstandard 1.5.1 is now available as the latest release of this widely-used data compression algorithm backed by Facebook that delivers on great performance. With the new release, performance is even better...

Mold 1.0 is a production-ready, high-speed linker alternative to GNU's Gold or LLVM's LLD that currently is supported on Linux systems and written by the original LLD author...

Last week I wrote about the interesting HIPSPV back-end for LLVM to take AMD HIP code -- which generally starts off as NVIDIA CUDA code to begin with before the HIP-ification -- and to be able to output that from the LLVM compiler stack as the SPIR-V intermediate representation used across OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. The goal with this is to be able to take AMD HIP code and ultimately be able to run it on Intel graphics processors but potentially other vendors/drivers too given the vendor-neutral SPIR-V. More of that HIPSPV work is now hitting mainline LLVM...

It was just over one week ago the systemd 250 release candidate was issued (along with a brown paper bag 250-rc2 fix-up release). Systemd 250 has a ton of changes for this init system and more while today systemd 250-rc3 was released with yet more changes in tow...

For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases...

One of the much requested Linux benchmarks since the debut of Intel Alder Lake last month has been for seeing the Core i9 12900K in different core configurations with its mix of P and E cores. Now that the Linux kernel activity has begun settling down around Alder Lake, here are those benchmarks for reference purposes with toggling Hyper Threading and different P and E core counts enabled.