Phoronix

It's been almost one year already since the last XWayland standalone feature release separate from the X.Org Server codebase itself while now the next feature installment will soon be out...

With the Linux 5.17 kernel merge window formally open today, among the early pull requests sent out this morning were the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver updates which is notable this time in preparation for next-generation AMD EPYC server hardware...

Following yesterday's release of Linux 5.16, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.16-gnu as their downstream that removes/disables any code depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode binaries, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and other cleaning in the name of free software...

As expected the Linux 5.16 kernel has been promoted to stable...

Back on Christmas Eve I noted how the Linux 5.16 performance was looking real good for AMD APUs as a performance improvement not widely noted to that point with significant uplift over Linux 5.15 stable. The good news is Linux 5.16 is set to debut as stable today and the benchmark results with AMD APU graphics is looking very promising after carrying out tests on additional available systems.

Sway 1.7 is up to its second release candidate for this popular i3-inspired Wayland lightweight compositor...

Among many other sound driver changes destined for the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle, Cirrus Logic has contributed CS35L41 HD audio codec support in the form of a new sound driver, cs35l41_hda...

Going back a number of months Google engineers have been working to address the issue of the Linux kernel's page reclaim code being too expensive for which they devised the multi-generational LRU framework "MGLRU" and it continues being worked on with mainline ambitions...

While our testing has consistently shown how Clear Linux can deliver leading performance on Intel/AMD x86_64 platforms, one of the user criticisms to that distribution has been around the limited selection of packaged software especially on the desktop side. But the rather interesting Distrobox can help address that by leveraging Podman or Docker to run other Linux distribution user-space software packages atop...

What may end up being one of the greatest Linux kernel features of 2022 is the recently published "Fast Kernel Headers" effort for cleaning up the kernel headers and dramatically speeding up Linux kernel builds both for absolute/clean and incremental builds. Fast Kernel Headers can cut the Linux kernel build time in half or greater and out this weekend are the v2 patches...

The Linux 5.16 stable kernel is slated for release tomorrow and it delivers on some grand improvements to kick off 2022. But as for great as the Linux 5.16 features are, we are already looking forward to the enhancements on deck with Linux 5.17...

It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components...

KDE developers have kicked off 2022 into full-swing with new features and other improvements now on their way to the next round of KDE software releases...

Adding to the changes for GNOME 42 this spring is the Mutter Wayland compositor now taking into account sub-surfaces when determining direct scanout capabilities...

Gentoo Linux developers were very busy over the course of 2021 for this popular rolling-release operating system choice...

Wine 7.0-rc5 is available for testing while the stable release of Wine 7.0.0 will be popped soon...

While the Linux 5.17 merge window doesn't open up until next week following Sunday's Linux 5.16 stable debut, due to lead Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie going on holiday next week he has sent out the feature pull early. Here is a look at the many GPU/display driver updates for this next kernel version...

Across dozens of articles over the past year I have covered a variety of different open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver optimizations from their kernel driver through their Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the popular RADV Vulkan driver, among other interesting open-source AMD contributions. For those wondering what the cumulative gain was for 2021 from all these AMD graphics driver changes, here are some end-of-year 2020 vs. 2021 benchmarks across a number of different Linux games while testing on Vega, Navi, and Navi 2 graphics cards.

A few minutes ago a new Ubuntu blog post hit the wire entitled "The Future of Snapcraft" where immediately I wondered if it was announcing plans to move away from their own app packaging/store/update tech and shift over to a Flatpak world like the rest of the Linux ecosystem for app sandboxing, app store, and distribution. Nope, but they are going to overhaul Snapcraft's architecture...

As part of the plethora of networking changes for Linux 5.17, NVIDIA is introducing support for Spectrum-4 networking ASICs...