Phoronix

With the recent NVIDIA 470 series Linux driver beta this R470 branch is the point at which NVIDIA is ending its GeForce 600/700 series "Kepler" support. The 470 driver series will be maintained as a long-lived driver that will continue to see security updates and Linux kernel / X.Org Server compatibility updates for another three years. If this end-of-life status has you thinking about trying out the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver with Kepler, here are some current benchmarks.

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat is preparing the release of XWayland 21.1.2 as the newest update to this standalone XWayland package separate from a whole X.Org Server release for running X11 clients within a Wayland environment...

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 continue improving consumer device support from newer AMD Ryzen laptops to multi-touch improvements...

AMD has issued their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 for Linux driver update as their quarterly packaged driver update intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics cards and former FirePro line-up...

Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features...

In preparing to close out the second quarter, the Intel Media Driver 2021Q2 was released today as the company's open-source stack for supporting GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on Linux...

Headlining the power management updates for the Linux 5.14 merge window is the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver now being adapted to handle hybrid processors...

The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes...

Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop...

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more...

AMD-specific code within Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a KVM guest to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components...

After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022...

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments...

Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code...

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release...

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021...

Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision...

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...