Phoronix

AMDVLK 2021.Q3.5 is out as the newest snapshot for this open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver...

The GNOME 41 beta is now available ahead of next month's official half-year update to this open-source desktop environment...

With the Linux 5.15 kernel merge window likely opening next week, Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has already sent in a prominent pull request to Linus Torvalds: the initial work around landing of the memory folios patches...

Last month I wrote about the proposed reflink support for Wine that would provide significant space savings for those having multiple Windows games/applications on Linux installed where Wine and derivatives like Crossover and Steam Play (Proton) generally maintain a separate "prefix" per software installation. Fortunately, that reflink support continues to be worked on for Wine where it can lead to savings up to several hundred megabytes per Wine prefix...

GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit...

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

Going on three years now there have been proposed patches for allowing per-client GPU engine statistics for being able to show on a per-game/application level how many resources across 3D/blitting/video engines are being consumed. The patches continue to be revised but sadly will be missing out on the imminent Linux 5.15 kernel merge window...

While Habana Labs has been known for their open-source and upstream Linux kernel driver for their AI training/inference accelerators with that code they had been working on as a start-up even before being acquired by Intel, it's continued to cause friction that they rely in user-space on closed-source components like their compiler. That in turn is again causing problems for changes that the Habana Labs kernel driver planned to land with the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle...

While Linux 5.14 stable is expected next weekend, the Reiser4 (and experimental Reiser5) file-system driver code has been finally updated for compatibility with the Linux 5.13 kernel series...

Running Linux on the Apple M1 with various out-of-tree patches is now capable of booting to a GNOME desktop albeit lacking any OpenGL/graphics acceleration...

The Linux 5.14 cycle is playing out smoothly and will likely lead to the Linux 5.14 stable kernel release happening next weekend...

Since the start of July we've seen Intel beginning Linux support patches for their DG2 graphics card that is now known by the "Alchemist" codename. There's been several rounds of DG2 patches since they started publicly pushing out the code -- including some notable work like DisplayPort 2.0 bring-up -- while sent out this Sunday is another important piece of the puzzle: getting the device memory (the dedicated vRAM) actually working with the open-source driver...

While it was busy on the hardware side of the house with Intel talking up all of their forthcoming hardware, Intel's open-source software engineers remain very busy working not only to enable their next-generation hardware but other open-source efforts they've invested in like the iNet wireless daemon...

Red Hat's Hans de Goede continues doing a commendable job improving the Linux support for various laptops with key improvements. One of the latest efforts by this longtime kernel developer has been about getting DisplayPort over USB Type-C connections working for more Intel hardware...

While Intel is normally very punctual in providing support for major new CPU features under Linux and often landing them well in advance of general hardware availability, their work around Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) has taken a long longer than normal and is still going through new rounds of code review to get accepted into the mainline Linux kernel...

Due to the growing threat posed by file-less malware attacks where malware code is executed from anonymous executable memory pages that aren't backed by data on the file-system, the "NAX" Linux security module has been seeing work recently for helping to protect against such scenarios...

It's been another busy week in KDE land with the seemingly never ending improvements to the Plasma Wayland session as well as introducing some new features like a new Overview Effect...

It's been nearly two months since Proton 6.3-5 released for powering Valve's Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. The latest Proton update was just released with many improvements...

AMD has published their fifth revision of SEV-SNP support for the KVM hypervisor and guest VM support for this Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging functionality found with new EPYC 7003 series server processors...

OpenSSH 8.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used SSH server/client software...