Phoronix

While Debian 11 "Bullseye" released just last August, there is already talk of development milestone dates for Debian 12 "Bookworm" for a likely release in 2023...

Microsoft in late 2020 announced DirectStorage as a new API in the DirectX family focused on delivering faster I/O performance for games to yield quicker game load times and more expansive virtual worlds. After being in a limited developer preview since last year, today Microsoft is making the DirectStorage API broadly available...

Recently merged to the Linux 5.17 Git code as a fix and now working its way to stable kernel series as a back-port is blanket disabling of PCI ATS on all Navi 10 and 14 GPUs due to problematic vBIOS configurations...

The team at OnLogic is celebrating Pi Day today by announcing the Factor 201 as a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 built for industrial IoT use-cases...

The open-source Intel HDA audio driver for Linux already supports Alder Lake S, P, M, and N series of processors while now there is support being added for "AlderLake-PS" as a seemingly yet to be announced variant...

Bcachefs as the next-generation Linux file-system born out of the kernel's block cache code is aiming to possibly go upstream in 2022 and as a result has been trying to work through its remaining invasive changes and other big ticket items before proceeding. Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet has put out another status update on this open-source file-system effort...

Linus Torvalds was hoping to release the stable Linux 5.17 kernel today but instead opted for Linux 5.17-rc8 as an extra release candidate...

ReactOS as the open-source project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/drivers is still working away in 2022 on symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support...

Back in Q4 the Mesa 21.3 release added Vulkan ray-tracing support for the RADV driver. That RADV ray-tracing support has continued to mature and see performance optimizations. The latest major achievement for RADV's ray-tracing support is implementing support for the Vulkan KHR_ray_query extension...

For quite a while now the modern AMD Linux kernel graphics driver (AMDGPU/AMDKFD code) has been the single largest driver within the mainline Linux kernel code-base. It's been far larger than the other upstream kernel drivers given the complexities of modern GPUs and is only becoming even larger...

One of the most prominent additions to the Linux 5.17 kernel is the introduction of the AMD P-State driver akin to Intel's P-State driver and aims to deliver better energy efficiency than AMD Zen 2 and newer processors currently on the ACPI CPUFreq driver. With Linux 5.18 an AMD P-State tracer tool is to be included with the kernel source tree for helping to analyze and tune this new driver...

We are a little more than one week away from the official GNOME 42.0 desktop release and packages are beginning to prepare their "v42.0" releases...

Back in February PostgreSQL began working on Zstd compression support and now with the latest code changes of the past week, this modern compression algorithm developed at Facebook is now able to play a greater role with this leading open-source database server...

Axis Communications on Friday published "Roadtest" as their initial patch-set for this new Linux driver testing framework...

Going along with the recent patches to stop building a.out support for Linux's Alpha and m68k architecture ports as the last of the CPU architectures that were still building the kernel with the support enabled, developers are ready to remove the x86 a.out support outright...

KDE developers remain very busy and productive even with everything going on in the world. This week the KDE desktop enjoyed many more fixes and improvements across the board...

Wine 7.4 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other operating systems...

Made public this week was the Spectre-BHB / BHI vulnerability and while only Intel and Arm processors are currently believed to be impacted, in the course of that research the folks at VUSec discovered AMD's current Retpoline strategy for Spectre V2 mitigations is not adequate. This has led to a change in behavior for AMD processors and is already applied to the Linux kernel. Here is a look at what it means for desktop and server performance due to the change in return trampoline handling.

For AMD Navi "RDNA1" GPUs and newer having at least Video Core Next 2.0 (VCN2) for the video coding block, a new feature was merged today into Mesa 22.1-devel for the open-source AMD video acceleration stack...

Linux 5.17 will hopefully be released on Sunday and with that next kernel there are many exciting features in tow. But for as great as Linux 5.17 is, there are many features I am already eager for with Linux 5.18. Here is an early look at a number of the changes expected in this next kernel version...