Phoronix

Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners...

PipeWire 0.3.39 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this audio/video stream solution for Linux systems that continues proving itself capable of replacing the roles of JACK and PulseAudio, among other use-cases...

While for many years we have been accustomed to seeing Intel land their new hardware feature enablement work in the Linux kernel and related components well ahead of products shipping, occasionally there are lapses due to various internal and external timings. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is quickly approaching and one of the major additions is Advanced Matrix Extensions with its Linux support still being in the works...

GCC 12 isn't seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system...

Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements...

Intel's "parallel submission" user-space API for their i915 kernel graphics driver has been queued into DRM-Next today ahead of the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle...

A new Steam client beta is out with a few Linux enhancements worth noting...

SiFive just shared word that at today's Linley Conference they teased their Performance P550 successor that will "set a new standard for the highest efficiency RISC-V processor available."..

An effort going on for a while at Canonical has been to develop a new desktop installer for Ubuntu. With the recent Ubuntu 21.10 release they are still using their classic Ubiquity installer by default but have published a new preview build of Ubuntu 21.10 with their new desktop installer option. Here is a look at Ubuntu's forthcoming new installer...

Following this week's release of Chrome 95, Google has now promoted Chrome 96 to beta status...

The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path...

It's been a half-year already since AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors that continue performing well and gaining marketshare. While the recently released Ubuntu 21.10 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, for those wondering what this latest Linux distribution means for EPYC 7003 series performance, here is a look at its performance across many benchmarks against that of Ubuntu 21.04 that was released right after the Milan launch and then Ubuntu 20.04 as the current LTS stable series.

AMD patches this month have begun preparing support for a new CPU feature called Smart Trace Buffer (STB)...

Mesa's V3DV driver for supporting newer Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware with Vulkan now is advertising v1.1 support. This Vulkan 1.1 support in V3DV is notable as the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer are the most notable beneficiaries of this driver...

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing...

The Ruby programming language implementation has merged YJIT, it's new just-in-time (JIT) compiler...

NVIDIA has made available CUDA 11.5 today as the latest version of their popular but proprietary compute stack/platform. Notable with CUDA 11.5 is that CUDA-Python has reached general availability status...

GIMP 3.0 as the GTK3 port of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative has been talked about for nearly a decade now and the work remains ongoing. However, out today is GIMP 2.99.8 as the newest development snapshot...

Last year Intel announced ControlFlag as a machine learning tool for helping to uncover bugs within code. ControlFlag promised impressive results after being trained on more than one billion lines of code and at the end of 2020 was already being used internally on Intel's code-bases from firmware to software applications. We hadn't heard anything more about ControlFlag this year... Until today. Intel has now made ControlFlag open-source for helping to autonomously detect more programming bugs...

The newest feature release to Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance Java Virtual Machine originating from IBM J9...