Phoronix

FEX-Emu is the open-source project striving for speedy x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 with similar objectives to Box86/Box64. FEX-Emu is working toward allowing Steam and other x86_64 Linux games to work on 64-bit Arm hardware and achieving some early success. Out today is FEX-Emu 2203 as the latest step in that direction...

Back in 2017 the Mesa open-source OpenGL driver for Broadcom VC5 hardware most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 aimed to enable anisotropic filtering (AF). However, that patch wasn't fully hooked up correctly and now this past week should be in good shape...

The open-source Tow-Boot project has been in development now for about one year as a "user-friendly" distribution of the U-Boot bootloader...

Version 7.6 of the digiKam open-source photo management software is now available with a number of enhancements...

Beyond all their timely Linux kernel contributions surrounding their processors and graphics hardware, Intel continues well with ensuring network adapters, Bluetooth, and other ASICs are generally well supported on Linux ahead of launch. With Linux 5.18 there is now support for "Madison peak" as another yet-to-be-announced Bluetooth chip...

Going back to the original Razer Copperhead mouse in 2005, I've tested many different Razer mice over the years and have exclusively used Razer mice on my main production system for basically as long. This week the scrollwheel physically broke on a Razer DeathAdder mouse I've used the past few years so quickly ordered a replacement, which sadly turned out to be the worst Razer mouse I've personally ever used, and replaced it a day later...

In development recently has been sdl12-compat as a compatibility layer that implements the SDL 1.2 interfaces atop SDL 2.0. This effort allows many older Linux games not seeing updates for SDL2 to in turn make use of the newer version by way of this compatibility layer...

Just under one month ago was the ROCm 5.0 release with formal RDNA2 support and on Friday night marked the latest point release for that open-source AMD Radeon Open eCosystem compute stack update...

Unfortunately this week the KDE project saw "overall activity was lower than usual" that in part at least seems to be fallout from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Sadly some Ukranian KDE contributors have been impacted by the ongoing situation and some KDE Russia contributors have also been impacted by their Internet restrictions...

Back in January I wrote about LatencyFlex as an open-source, vendor-agnostic alternative to NVIDIA Reflex. This drop-in replacement to NVIDIA's proprietary solution focused on reducing rendering latency is out with its very first release...

Apache NetBeans 13 is now available as the latest version of this popular open-source integrated development environment (IDE)...

After many years of waiting and past faltered efforts, "Imagination Tech publishing a new open-source driver" probably wasn't on your bingo card for 2022... But they are doing such with a new open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver for Mesa...

In addition to this morning's release of VKD3D-Proton 2.6, DXVK 1.10 has been released as the Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...

VKD3D-Proton 2.6 is out as the latest update to this project used by Steam Play / Proton for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan for accelerating Windows games on Linux...

Besides the dance of getting all of the various open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver components upstreamed (i.e. the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, LLVM back-end) and worked out to major Linux distributions in time for new graphics processor releases, another challenge has been on the firmware/microcode front with also needing those binary blobs made publicly available in time and also picked up by the Linux distributions. For some past Radeon graphics card launches AMD hasn't posted those necessary blobs until the day of or a few days past launch. Fortunately, ahead of their next launch, the initial firmware binaries were posted today...

Up to this point my Intel Alder Lake DDR5 memory testing on Linux has been limited to a set of DDR5-4400 modules given the very limited DDR5 availability. But with having recently received a DDR5-6000 kit, here is a look at how the Intel Core i9 12900K performs under Linux with memory speeds up to DDR5-6000 and running a memory scaling comparison from 3000 to 6000 MT/s.

Mesa's Venus driver providing VirtIO-GPU Vulkan support that was developed by Google as part of the Virgil effort for 3D acceleration within guest VMs can now run ANGLE. Google's ANGLE in turn is their OpenGL ES conformant implementation that can run atop Vulkan / Metal / OpenGL / Direct3D interfaces...

The Rust-based Cloud-Hypervisor that started out as an open-source VMM at Intel for cloud workloads and now developed under the Linux Foundation is out with a new feature release...

Following this week's release of Chrome 99, Google has now promoted Chrome 100 to beta...

Added back in 2020 with the Linux 5.10 kernel was the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode for reducing commit latency in the ordered data mode. Now for the upcoming Linux 5.18 cycle, that fast commits mode should be even faster...