Phoronix

Here should hopefully be a great indication about AMD's Linux efforts moving forward with one of their recent and exciting hires at the company...

In preparation for the support within their Vulkan driver, the Intel-led effort for preparing mesh shader support within Mesa's NIR and SPIR-V code has now been merged...

It's been a relatively quiet summer in the Wine-Staging world with not many new patches surfacing for testing/experimental purposes for this more bleeding edge version of Wine. However, with Wine-Staging 6.16 there are at least some new patches now to talk about...

The Plasma 5.23 desktop release is looking like it will be quite an eventful milestone while KDE developers are finishing August strong with many improvements and fixes across their desktop stack...

ROCm 4.3 released at the start of August with support for HMM memory allocations, support for indirect function calls and C++ virtual functions with the ROCm compiler, improved data center tool integration, better rocBLAS performance, and a range of other improvements. In approaching the end of August, ROCm 4.3.1 is now available...

Wine 6.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this widely-used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other systems...

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code...

A number of Phoronix readers have been asking about some fresh file-system comparisons on recent kernels. With not having the time to conduct the usual kernel version vs. file-system comparison, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system benchmarks on a speedy WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe solid-state drive...

The Linux kernel has already sported SM4 cipher algorithm implementation optimized for AES-NI and AVX while now an Alibaba engineer has contributed an AVX2 optimized variant for even greater performance...

For nearly the past decade there has been calls for deprecating the Liux kernel's frame-buffer "FBDEV" device code though the code remains within the kernel. While these days most display drivers are DRM-based even in the embedded world, a lot of FBDEV code still ends up in kernel builds even when just wanting to use DRM's FBDEV emulation layer. But a patch proposal out of Red Hat would further split-up the FBDEV core support to allow less of it to be built...

On top of all the PCI IDs in place already for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver, another 17 PCI IDs were added in a new patch for this open-source Radeon graphics driver...

While Ubuntu 21.10 isn't being released for another two months, the release schedule for Ubuntu 22.04 has been published that is rather notable in being the next bi-annual long-term support (LTS) release...

PipeWire, for managing audio/video streams on Linux and proving itself to be a viable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, is out with a new update...

Google promoted Chrome 94 to beta status today with some exciting changes...

Started back in 2018 was an effort by the NetBSD project to update their operating system WiFi drivers by re-syncing more code from FreeBSD and making various improvements. Three years later the work has yet to be merged but after stalling for some time is back to being worked on by interested developers...

Earlier this month was a look at the LLVM Clang 13 performance on EPYC 7003 showing this forthcoming compiler update to be in good shape for AMD Zen 3, but how is the performance looking on the Intel side? This round of benchmarking is looking at the LLVM Clang 11 / 12 / 13 compiler performance on Intel's flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" 2P server configuration.

After a slight delay, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is available today as the newest point release for the current Ubuntu Linux long-term support release...

The GNOME project has launched "Apps For GNOME" at apps.gnome.org for highlighting the ecosystem of available GNOME applications...

The Qt Company has formally released Qt Creator 5.0 today as their latest version of this Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment...

Google Chrome OS engineers are working on making Linux's VirtIO-GPU driver more extensible. The VirtIO-GPU driver has been modeled around the Virgl protocol for handling 3D within guest virtual machines but with a new context type addition they aim to support additional protocols...