Phoronix

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on some important performance fixes for the GNOME desktop...

Work continues on getting the Broadcom VC4 kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver into shape for being able to support 4K display outputs at 60Hz...

For passionate Phoronix readers around the Rust programming language, SixtyFPS is a new graphical toolkit offering focused on Rust but also supporting C++ and JavaScript...

The Netfilter project has announced the release of Nftables 1.0.0 for their user-space code for interfacing with the Linux kernel's Nftables subsystem for network filtering and classification...

For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series...

The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple...

Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite...

A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel...

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41...

While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API...

Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux...

After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more...

It looks like 2022 is when we will start seeing DisplayPort 2.0 hardware broadly available... It was just earlier this week I wrote about AMD working on DisplayPort 2.0 for their open-source Radeon Linux driver and now coincidentally today Intel has begun their open-source Linux graphics driver enablement for DP 2.0...

It's been over two years since The Khronos Group acknowledged they were working on safety critical Vulkan and now finally the 1.0 provisional release is approaching for this graphics/compute interface suitable for safety critical systems...

Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program...

This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 "Bullseye" as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" hardware.

Six dozen patches working on the PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure for real-time kernels is now queued up in TIP's "locking/core" branch and will presumably be sent in for the Linux 5.15 merge window coming up quickly...

A set of two patches posted this week would allow the Linux kernel to be easily built with the different x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels supported by the latest LLVM Clang and GCC compilers...