Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just released the fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.14 and he's happy with how it's shaping up a few weeks before release...

0 A.D. as the long in development real-time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games is out with its twenty-fifth alpha release...

Thunderbird 91.0 is approaching release as an annual feature release to this open-source, cross-platform mail client and RSS reader. Given the current release is Thunderbird 78 from last July, there is a lot in store for this "2021" update...

The Linux kernel already supports making use of Arm's True Random Number Generator (TRNG) SMCCC interface within the random seed code while for the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle an "arm_smccc_trng" driver is being added and will allow exposing the entropy to user-space...

Intel engineers on Friday submitted a big batch of kernel graphics driver improvements to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window...

The months-long effort for adding DRM lease support to Wayland via a new protocol has now been merged into Wayland Protocols as a new staging addition. The "drm_lease_v1" is principally motivated for improving the virtual reality head-mounted dispkay support under Wayland...

It's been two years already since Latte Dock 0.9 was released while finally Latte Dock 0.10 is ready to officially meet the world this weekend...

The first week of August saw many fixes land in the KDE camp as they prepare for their software to be used on more third-party products, with Steam Deck being just the latest notable product leveraging KDE...

Last week's AMDGPU pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.15 added support for the "Cyan Skillfish" APU and other early work while an additional pull request was submitted on Friday...

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine...

In recent months there has been an effort to update GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to reflect the GTK4 toolkit and recommendations around new widgets, utility panes, and more for enhancing the accessibility of GNOME applications, arguably looking better, and just otherwise modernizing aspects of the HIG that haven't been touched in months. That updated GNOME HIG is now official...

AMD has published their newest open-source Vulkan driver snapshot from their official sources that comprise this "AMDVLK" offering for Linux users...

After the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT was announced last week and ahead of the retail availability next week, today AMD's "unboxing embargo" has expired for this new RDN2 graphics card focused on delivering high 1080p frame rates. The card we have been testing out under Linux is the ASRock Phantom Gaming RX 6600 XT.

Mozilla is trying once again to enable AVIF image decoding support by default within the Firefox web browser. AVIF is the promising image file format based on using AV1 in the HEIF file format...

Amazon's Data Access Monitor "DAMON" code is now set for introduction in Linux 5.15...

Intel security researchers have been working on implementing toolchain-optimized fine-grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support on top of Intel's hardware-based Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). By leveraging Intel CET, the Control-Flow Integrity overhead is much lower than the otherwise pure software/compiler-based approach. This Linux security improvement is being worked on under the name of FineIBT...

Flax Engine 1.2.6222 is out today as the first v1.2 update for this cross-platform, open-source but commercial game engine...

The ongoing FUTEX2 work for making the futex handling more like Windows to in turn help Windows games on Linux via Wine (with a focus on Steam Play's Proton) has taken a new turn...

This summer we have been testing the Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE as one of the company's newest options for those in the market for an AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" 1U 1P barebones server. Across our wide range of Linux and BSD benchmarking this Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE with Tyan S8036GM2NE motherboard has been holding up well and meeting our requirements and proven reliability in having tested Tyan products now at Phoronix for over the past 16 years.

While Samba is well known for SMB/CIFS server support on Linux and other platforms for supporting Microsoft's SMB networking protocol for file and print services, Samba is implemented in user-space while Samsung has been pursuing an SMB server implemented in kernel-space for better performance and wiring up new features that can be more easily accomplished within the kernel...