Phoronix

A new batch of Intel kernel graphics driver code was mailed out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.16 kernel merge window. Lots of notable changes in this pull!..

The xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver that is commonly in use for systems running an X.Org Server will soon find better support if you have a multi-monitor configuration where only some displays can support variable rate refresh (VRR / Adaptive-Sync / FreeSync)...

With the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a patch to benefit tiered memory systems with a focus on servers having persistent memory. That patch is demoting pages during page reclamation to slower tiers of memory such as Optane DC persistent memory. Intel continues building on that and other persistent memory kernel work for plumbing the kernel with optimized memory placement for these modern servers...

The AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver code today landed a nice optimization for benefiting PRIME setups with integrated and discrete Radeon GPUs...

Earlier this week I posted benchmarks showing how Intel Tiger Lake performance has improved nicely for Ubuntu 21.10 compared to Ubuntu 21.04. Of course, readers immediately wondered whether this also applied on the AMD laptop side... So here are some tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop under Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and then also looking at running Linux 5.15 + Mesa 21.3-devel Git for an even more bleeding edge experience.

The Apache Software Foundation today announced the release of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.11 as their 14th release while stewarding this open-source office suite...

Intel's CM Compiler is out with its first big update since earlier in the year for advancing their "C For Metal" GPU programming language effort...

Somewhat of a surprising change with Intel Gen12.5 graphics is that they have removed the hardware supporting Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). Intel's Linux graphics driver has now been updated to address Gen12.5+ foregoing hardware support for ASTC texture compression...

The GNU toolchain (initially with the GNU Assembler) has begun landing support for RISC-V's Zbs instructions that are part of the Bitmanip extension to the processor ISA...

For the better part of the past decade Google has been pursuing performance improvements to their Chrome/Chromium web browser as the "RenderingNG" initiative to provide faster web page performance, lower memory consumption, and better battery life. This current work is finally wrapping up in 2021 to great success...

NVIDIA today published their newest Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux with some new extension support plus Vulkan Video enhancements...

FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware...

Next month's release of Chrome 96 is a bit more exciting now thanks to the work of Jan Grulich at Red Hat...

Red Hat today made available the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 (RHEL 8.5) beta, incorporating a half-year of improvements to this flagship enterprise Linux distribution...

Canonical today announced the launch of Ubuntu Frame, its full-screen shell built atop the Wayland-embracing Mir server for embedded displays, IoT, and related use-cases...

For those wondering how AMD's latest-generation Radeon RX 6000 series is competing now between the Linux driver options of AMD's official Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 "PRO" driver stack and the latest upstream, fully open-source driver components from Mesa and the mainline Linux kernel, here is a fresh comparison.

A new batch of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window. With this week's changes there is a notable addition for the Broadcom V3D DRM kernel driver, which most notably is for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer...

At last week's Linux Foundation Open-Source Summit / Embedded Linux Conference there was a Sony presentation about their history with open-source/Linux and how since last year they have been "accelerating" their open-source contributions...

We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware...

One of our favorite open-source game projects, ET: Legacy for letting the legendary game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory live on as a community project, is out with a new release...