Phoronix

Intel has another big batch of open-source kernel graphics driver updates it sent out to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle. The DG2 graphics card is getting wired up while this pull request does also finally remove the Cannon Lake "Gen 10" graphics that never materialized in commercial products...

Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced "Lightway" as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source...

The Elementary OS Linux distribution known for its very polished and well crafted desktop experience is out with its big 6.0 "Odin" update...

With the Radeon RX 6600 XT review embargo lifted and the cards set to hit retail channels this week, the Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver has been released in now officially supporting the RX 6600 series...

SDL 2.0.16 is officially out today as the latest update to this widely-used cross-platform library for serving as an abstraction layer around graphics, controllers / input, and more that makes it widely used by cross-platform games as well as the likes of the Steam Runtime...

NVIDIA today released their latest stable driver update in the 470 series for Linux users...

The Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced at the end of July as AMD's newest RDNA2 graphics card and is optimized for a performant 1080p gaming experience. For those wondering about its performance, this morning the embargo lifts to be able to talk about its performance. Here are the first Linux gaming benchmarks of the Radeon RX 6600 XT against a wide assortment of other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

Firefox 91.0 is out this morning as the latest monthly update to Mozilla's cross-platform web browser...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has been working on a number of improvements in recent days to the RADV Vulkan driver's handling around delta color compression (DCC) fast clears...

Future AMD CPUs -- potentially AMD EPYC 7004 "Genoa" -- will be supporting 5-level paging...

Intel's Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used by their Windows driver as well as the Intel Compute Runtime for OpenCL / Level Zero support (and potentially the Mesa drivers in the future) has now landed Alder Lake P enablement...

It looks like X.Org Server 21.1 (long in development the past few years as X.Org Server 1.21) will see a stable release in the coming weeks...

Intel's next-generation C/C++ compilers are fully leveraging the LLVM compiler stack in place of their former proprietary compiler code-base. Intel has "complete[d] adoption" of LLVM moving forward for their C/C++ compiler needs...

The latest AMD SEV work happening to the Linux kernel for benefiting EPYC servers with virtualization is the new "sev_secret" module for allowing guests to access confidential computing secret areas...

For more than one year now Oracle engineers have been working on Trenchboot support for securely booting the Linux kernel. Sent out today is the third revision of this work for establishing a dynamic root of trust for measurement...

Last month after Microsoft began publishing their Windows Insider Preview builds of Windows 11, I ran some early Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Linux led in those benchmarks on the AMD Zen 3 desktop while for those wondering if that still holds true for Intel hardware, here are benchmarks of a Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" desktop with Windows 10 21H1, Windows 11 in its latest preview build as of testing, and then compared to Arch Linux / Clear Linux / Ubuntu.

Audio/video encoders and decoders are one of the areas where usage of the Rust programming language has increasing interest for speed and safety. One of the most promising Rust-written encoders at the moment is Rav1e for AV1 video encoding and it's now working towards its v0.5 release...

Merged one month ago was RadeonSI enabling by default its optimization to replace uniforms with literals inside shaders. This uniform inlining helped with SPECViewPerf and other workloads but it turns out in the process sharply drove up CPU usage when running some games...

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is expected later this month as the next point release to the "Focal Fossa" long-term support cycle. With this update comes the hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 21.04 which in turn means Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.0 graphics support is available as package updates now...

Synopsys is looking to phase out support for the oldest ARC processors found within the mainline Linux kernel...