Phoronix

Fwupd 1.7.3 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software that integrates with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering streamlined system and device firmware updates under Linux...

PipeWire 0.3.41 is out as the newest version of this increasingly-used Linux audio/video stream server solution...

Queued up as part of the x86/core changes intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle is dropping of the AMD 3DNow! code within the kernel. While 3DNow! brings back fond memories from the days of AMD's K6 and early Athlon processors, AMD deprecated the instructions a decade ago and no longer found in newer processors. Removing of the 3DNow! kernel code is being done as part of some code improvements...

Ubisoft issued a new job posting for a Linux developer, which has many Linux gamers excited especially as it's mentioned for an "unannounced project." Unfortunately, contrary to all the emailed tips in overnight about the job posting, it ultimately will likely prove to be of little interest to the gaming community...

It looks like EXT4 come Linux 5.17 could be making use of the kernel's new mount API. Queued up into EXT4's "dev" branch is transitioning the EXT4 file-system driver to using the kernel's modern mount API...

AMD's "RDNA" class GPUs support wavefront sizes of 32 and 64 compared to older GCN GPUs at 64 threads. Going back to 2019 RadeonSI began making use of Wave32 for some shaders but now for Mesa 22.0 next quarter there are greater Wave32 improvements that have landed...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc5 and while things are looking normal at this stage, he announced that this 5.16 cycle will drag on longer due to the Christmas / New Year's holidays...

OpenRazer as the open-source, community-maintained collection of Razer peripheral support for Linux is out with a new release...

One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel...

This year there has been a lot of Linux kernel work around improving the handling of tiered memory servers, namely those with traditional system RAM augmented by Intel Optane DC persistent memory. There has been work to demote pages during reclamation to the slower persistent memory, improving NUMA balancing around such systems to optimize memory placement, transparent page placement and related work around tiered memory Linux servers...

Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it's sounded a lot like AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security...

Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters...

One year after Apple introduced the M1 SoC and the effort began to bring-up this Apple Silicon under Linux, the effort remains ongoing and more code is inching closer to the mainline kernel...

The recent activity around x86 (x86_64 included) straight-line speculation mitigation handling is set to culminate with this security feature being set for mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle...

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS isn't expected to run on aging IBM POWER8 hardware as Canonical is shifting its PPC64EL architecture baseline to POWER9 for building packages...

SeaBIOS as the open-source x86 BIOS implementation commonly used by QEMU as well as a Coreboot payload is out with a new release...

Even with the holidays quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy in landing fixes -- especially crash fixes -- and fixing up Plasma's Wayland session for ensuring it is very polished for 2022...

The highly anticipated Godot 4.0 game engine release continues moving closer and should soon see an official alpha release...

Following last week's Wine 6.23 development release, Wine 7.0-rc1 was just declared in marking the end of feature development and beginning preparations for issuing Wine 7.0.0 stable in January...

The open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver work covered yesterday about a big optimization by leveraging NIR and going through that intermediate representation and relying on common NIR optimizations has now been merged into Mesa 22.0. This is a step-up from the existing open-source OpenGL driver support for old Radeon 9500 through Radeon X1000 series (R500) graphics processors. A similar conversion is also planned for the old Nouveau driver handling NVIDIA "NV30" era graphics processors too...