Phoronix

Even with Akademy 2021 this week as the annual KDE developer conference, thanks in part to it being a virtual event the KDE developers still managed to remain quite productive on new code changes...

Coreboot making progress on its temporary RAM initialization code (cache as RAM) means that its usage of the FSP-T binary blob is increasingly unnecessary...

Valve and their partners have issued a new version of Proton for powering Steam Play to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at GCC 11 performance with varying optimization levels and features like link-time optimizations. Stemming from reader requests, here are now similar reference benchmarks off LLVM Clang 12.0 on the same system with going from -O0 to -Ofast and toggling -march=native and LTO usage.

Earlier this month systemd 249-rc1 arrived with a variety of new features and improvements. Now for closing out the month is a second release candidate...

If all is looking well on Sunday, Linus Torvalds will be releasing Linux 5.13 as stable rather than going with a 5.13-rc8 test release and pushing the final version back by an additional release. In either case, Linux 5.13 is coming out soon and with many new features in tow...

Among the many projects under the GNU umbrella, the GNU Health official project has been about working on the libre digital health ecosystem and their most recent effort is on MyGNUHealth as an effort around libre personal health records...

Following the announcement this week that AMD is dropping pre-Polaris GPU support (or pre-Raven Ridge support for APUs) from their mainline Radeon Software driver on Windows, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver has also now similarly discontinued that older GPU support...

Simon Ser has released Sway 1.6.1 as the newest version of this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

There's the next chapter to the unfortunately rather sad state of the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver support under Linux...

Since Crocus was merged into mainline Mesa last week we have been looking at benchmarks of this new open-source Intel Gallium3D driver designed exclusively for older Intel graphics hardware (i965 Gen4 through Haswell Gen7, plus Cherrvyiew and experimental Gen8 Broadwell) compared to the existing open-source i965 classic driver. Prior articles have looked at the quite good performance with Haswell while Sandy Bridge is in somewhat rough shape. Today's testing is going in the middle and looking at the Crocus vs. i965 OpenGL driver performance for Ivy Bridge with the once great Core i7 3770K.

For those wondering about the recent skyrocketing in LVFS/FWUPD usage for Linux firmware updates, it appears to be attributed to Dell pushing out a massive number of updates with more than one hundred models impacted by newly-disclosed BIOS/UEFI vulnerabilities...

As expected this morning Microsoft officially lifted the curtain on Windows 11 as the latest evolutionary step to their operating system past Windows 10...

Amazon today launched AWS BugBust as a global coding challenge where they are hoping to see one million software bugs addressed and to reduce technical debt by over $100 million USD...

As part of Google's latest work on trying to enhance open-source software security, months after starting their own open-source vulnerability database they are now looking to push an open-source vulnerability interchange schema to make it easier to exchange information on vulnerabilities and making it easier for automated analysis...

With the latest mainline Git kernel as well as the newest stable point releases as of Wednesday, a Spectre issue with the kernel's BPF subsystem has been addressed...

Alibaba engineers are looking to mainline an x86_64 tuned version of the SM4 cipher that with making use of AVX and AES-NI can allow for a dramatic performance speed-up...

The OASIS standards organization has now officially approved of the ODF 1.3 revision of the OpenDocument Format as their newest ratified standard...

Valve's Dota 2 game is the latest adding support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and the first time having a Linux-native game support FSR for enhanced image upscaling...

With the KVM code set to be merged in the coming weeks for the Linux 5.14 kernel, support for fast XMM hypercalls is coming for its Hyper-V guest support in allowing for some performance benefits...