Phoronix

Con Kolivas has worked on many patches for the Linux kernel over the past two decades and particularly focused on innovations around desktop performance/interactivity. For over a decade now he's primarily been focused on maintaining his work out-of-tree and not catering to mainline acceptance but now he is thinking of bowing out once more and ending his kernel development effort...

David Airlie submitted today the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates for the Linux 5.15 merge window...

Going from ~11 FPS to ~602 FPS for an open-source game marks the latest work on Zink for OpenGL atop Vulkan within Mesa...

The x86/IRQ changes for the Linux 5.15 kernel bring some unexpected improvements to old hardware...

It looks like the real-time (RT) patches for the Linux kernel are almost to the point of being fully upstream in the mainline Linux kernel. Merged for Linux 5.15 is the PREEMPT_RT locking code that represents a bulk of the outstanding RT patches...

It looks like within the coming days that the Vulkan ray-tracing support for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver will be upstreamed for Mesa 21.3...

In addition to the block subsystem changes submitted for the Linux 5.15 merge window, Jens Axboe also sent in a separate pull request for this new kernel cycle to provide support for bio recycling. In turn this can enhance the Linux I/O limits by around 10%...

Pyston began many years ago as an open-source JIT-based Python implementation developed by Dropbox. But after Dropbox dropped Pyston development, it went dormant for several years before the developers decided to create their own start-up around it and released Pyston 2.0. The Pyston developers are now joining well known Python organization Anaconda...

Linux block subsystem maintainer and I/O expert Jens Axboe sent in his set of feature pull requests today for the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle...

Ingo Molnar began sending in his pull requests bright and early as usual for the just-opened Linux 5.15 merge window. With the scheduler changes for this next kernel version there are some improvements worth mentioning but also worth mentioning is what hasn't found its way to the kernel yet: any software optimizations around Intel Thread Director for upcoming Alder Lake processors...

Worked on for more than one year is the patches out of Amazon for allowing opt-in L1 data cache flushing on context switching. This L1d flushing is done in the name of greater security given the various CPU speculative execution hardware vulnerabilities these days and protecting against other possible future vulnerabilities. After trying to get the code merged last summer, Linus Torvalds called it "beyond stupid" and reverted the code but now for Linux 5.15 a revised form of it was submitted...

For those after an easy-to-use desktop distribution built off Arch Linux, Endeavour OS continues filling the void left by the former Antergos project. Endeavour OS is closing out August by releasing new ISOs that include a number of updates to its installer...

One of the very first pull requests for Linux 5.15 now that its merge window is open following the Linux 5.14 release is to merge KSMBD, the in-kernel SMB3 protocol file server...

Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions...

As expected Linus Torvalds promoted Linux 5.14 to stable in providing the latest features, hardware support, and other improvements ahead of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution releases...

The Linux hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem for the 5.15 cycle is already seeing the AMD SB-RMI driver and AMD Cezanne Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring while there was also some last-minute additions around AMD next-gen "Yellow Carp" temperature reporting and separately support for another water cooling pump...

While the Linux 5.15 merge window opening is imminent, merged today to net-next were the latest batch of wireless driver updates for this next kernel version. Notable to this batch of WiFi driver updates was the new Intel material...

Near the beginning of the year was some rare work on Linux's floppy disk driver and -- a half-year later -- it was found out that not only do people with systems using floppy disks still move to newer kernels, but that work earlier in the year had regressed the Linux kernel's floppy disk handling. Now coming for Linux 5.15 is a fix...

If all goes according to plan the Linux 5.14 kernel will be released as stable today. Linux 5.14 has many new features but there is also a lot of work slated for the next cycle, Linux 5.15. Here's a look...

The Chrome/Chromium web browser now has fully-enabled the Ozone/X11 platform support across both beta and stable channels...