Phoronix

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...

Earlier this week Amazon introduced Intel Xeon Scalable 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" powered EC2 cloud instances and marks their first x86-based sixth-generation offerings that follow their "M6g" Graviton2 instances launched last year. Curious about the "M6i" Ice Lake performance with AWS, here are a number of benchmarks looking at the performance and value of the new M6i instances compared to former Intel M5 instances as well as Amazon's own M6g Graviton2 instances.

AMD has launched the Infinity Hub as their newest "open-source portal"...

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on some important performance fixes for the GNOME desktop...

Work continues on getting the Broadcom VC4 kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver into shape for being able to support 4K display outputs at 60Hz...

For passionate Phoronix readers around the Rust programming language, SixtyFPS is a new graphical toolkit offering focused on Rust but also supporting C++ and JavaScript...

The Netfilter project has announced the release of Nftables 1.0.0 for their user-space code for interfacing with the Linux kernel's Nftables subsystem for network filtering and classification...

For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series...

The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple...

Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite...

A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel...

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41...

While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API...

Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux...

After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more...