Phoronix

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...

In addition to releasing FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1, the FreeBSD project also published its Q4'2021 status report to recap all of the open-source activities achieved for this BSD operating system during the past quarter...

Back in 2019 that seems like an eternity ago with all that's gone on in the world, the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support. This executable / object code / shared library file format was used prior to the dominance of ELF but is seldom if ever used today. There have been pending patches to finally remove a.out from the kernel while the plan now is to stop building it on Alpha and Motorola 68000 targets to see if anyone notices/cares...

Out today is the first beta release of the upcoming FreeBSD 13.1 operating system update...

OpenZFS 2.1.3 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation compatible with modern Linux and FreeBSD systems...