Phoronix

As we approach the end of the calendar year there was some uncertainty whether Linux 5.15 would be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel or if it would be Linux 5.16 albeit not likely releasing until the start of 2022.....

PHPStan 1.0 was released today as the first stable release for this leading open-source PHP static analysis tool...

As expected after first reporting on it a month ago when the FUTEX2 patches were queued up in locking/core, this work with the new sys_futex_waitv() system call for helping the Windows on Linux gaming experience will indeed land for Linux 5.16...

It was an exciting October even amid the ongoing pandemic as at least Linux/open-source enthusiasts were able to enjoy the Ubuntu 21.10 debut, ongoing Linux I/O optimizations many of which are now coming to mainline in 5.16, numerous AMD driver enhancements, NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack finally introducing GBM support, X.Org Server 21.1 released, and much more...

Right after last night's Linux 5.15 kernel release, the Free Software Foundation folks issued GNU Linux-libre 5.15-gnu as the newest version of their downstream that removes functionality dependent upon binary-only/non-free-software firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load closed kernel modules and other determined non-free-software restrictions...

Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week...

Back in September at the end of the Linux 5.15 merge window was our Linux 5.15 feature overview but given the time since then and that the Linux 5.15 stable kernel will likely be released this evening, here is a recap of the most interesting changes in this new kernel version...

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a decade-old project that forked from the KDE 3.5 desktop continues persevering bit-by-bit to improve this once widely enjoyed desktop environment...

After memory folios failed to make it into Linux 5.15, this low-level change to the kernel memory management code that has possible performance implications is looking to land for Linux 5.16...

Back in February 2020 SDL2 began seeing early work for RISC OS support. Now being merged this weekend to this key library used by many cross-platform games is now more functioning support for the RISC OS Arm-based operating system...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe has prepared his various pull requests ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has landed native support for OpenRISC on Linux and GDB server support...

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan open-source driver "RADV" is preparing to introduce experimental support for mesh shaders...

Mozilla Firefox 94 will begin using its EGL back-end on the Linux desktop in conjunction with supported graphics drivers in order to provide better performance, lower power usage, and other benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.23 offers much better Plasma Wayland support than prior releases but still the journey of polished Wayland support on-par with X11 is not over. KDE developers ended out October working on more Wayland fixes along with other improvements to this open-source desktop...

OpenVDB is the software open-sourced by DreamWorks Animations that is now part of the Academy Software Foundation as a sparse volume data structure and associating tooling with a particular focus on visual effects and animations for film production. OpenVDB 9.0 is out today as the latest major update to this library...

While Ardour is arguably the most well known open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solution, there are also other offerings like Zrythm and others while now "Stargate" is the newest option available...

Project Trident had been an operating system originally based on TrueOS/FreeBSD before shifting to Void Linux as its base and worked on various innovations like OpenZFS-based root installations but now the developers behind the ambitious advanced desktop OS project have decided to call it quits...

While there has been less major progress to report on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan code in recent weeks, Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve and others continue optimizing and fixing this increasing useful implementation. Most recently the game Bioshock: Infinite is running on Zink and there are more fixes in aiming toward OpenGL 4.6 conformance...