Phoronix

Wine developers have popped open a new bi-weekly development snapshot of this software that allows Windows games/applications to run on Linux and macOS along with being what powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver...

Intel's Compute-Runtime stack for providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute for their graphics hardware under Linux is out with a new release...

For those making use of Radeon graphics on Linux with an X.Org-based environment and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX but rather than the xf86-video-amdgpu driver, AMD today put out a rare update to that diminishing driver component...

AMD driver engineers have submitted their latest batch of AMDGPU feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time. With this latest pull request the big addition is the new "Cyan Skillfish" GPU support...

VMware has found the Linux 5.13 kernel that was released as stable one month ago has led to a serious performance regression for their ESXi enterprise hypervisor...

Years ago particularly when the open-source Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy it was known in some cases having to fake/spoof the GPU driver name or model in order to workaround artificial bugs / problematic code paths targeted to a particular OpenGL driver or even to achieve greater performance. With a new Mesa merge request called "Unleash the dragon!", this is still very much a problem in 2021 even now in the Android space...

For those wondering what has been going on in the Xubuntu camp for this Xfce desktop spin of Ubuntu, a Xubuntu 21.10 development update was shared concerning package changes and other happenings...

Following last week's release of Chrome 92, Google has now made available the Chrome 93 beta as the next iteration of their cross-platform web browser...

In addition to the AOCC compiler for Zen CPUs, another LLVM/Clang downstream maintained by AMD is the AOMP compiler as where they host their various patches not yet merged around Radeon OpenMP offloading support. This week marked the release of AOMP 13.0-5 as their latest work on that front for the newest OpenMP GPU offloading capabilities...

AMD just lifted the embargo on the Radeon RX 6600 XT, its newest entry in their RDNA2 line-up and optimized for delivering a superior 1080p gaming performance against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 series. The RX 6600 XT isn't hitting retail availability until August and that is when we'll be able to publish benchmarks, but for now here is an overview of this new graphics card launching at the $379 price point.

Valve just pushed out a rather significant Steam beta update for gamers across Windows, macOS, and Linux...

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation but recently has also been engaged in some of the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver work and related to that is the venerable LLVMpipe OpenGL Gallium3D driver. Needless to say, there's some interesting work happening...

Those having to deal with data stored on NTFS partitions from Linux have been eagerly awaiting the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software has been working now for a year to upstream into the Linux kernel. No pull request has been sent in yet but the twenty-seventh spin of this driver was published today...

Following the recent benchmarks seeing how AMD's new AOCC 3.1 compiler has brought some performance improvements over the prior AOCC 3.0 release that introduced initial Zen 3 optimizations, here are some benchmarks looking at how that latest AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler performance compares to the upstream LLVM Clang 12 compiler for which it is based as well as against GCC 11 as the latest GNU compiler release that remains common to Linux systems.

Manjaro 21.1 is on the way as the newest release of this Arch Linux based operating system that is popular for its desktop ease of use...

While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning...

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles...

Last month I wrote about a possible global counter for block/disk changes on Linux being discussed by Microsoft and systemd developers to better track changes via a system-wide monotonically increasing number as an alternative to the existing per-disk tracking. That functionality is now queued up as part of the block subsystem changes ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window in a few weeks...

The Mesa release train continues at full speed ahead for these open-source Linux graphics driver components...

Intel's open-source "Iris" Gallium3D driver for providing modern OpenGL driver support on their graphics hardware from Broadwell through all current Gen12 / Xe Graphics era hardware has been in great shape for some time and works wonderfully. But Intel's not done furthering this Linux OpenGL driver and today they now have threaded shader compilation merged...