Phoronix

RenderDoc 1.14 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform / cross-API graphics debugger...

KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow...

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver for Linux is poised to report more graphics throttling status information to user-space...

Released today was a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS (nee Raspbian) with various improvements over its prior update from March...

Yet another release candidate of OpenZFS 2.1 is now available for testing and this time around there are some interesting changes to note...

While yesterday was the Threadripper 3990X Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks, with recently picking up the $450 Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 with Ryzen 5 5500U, prior to wiping the Windows 10 preload I ran some benchmarks to see how that default Microsoft Windows 10 Home installation compared to a fresh install of Ubuntu 21.04 for maximizing the performance potential of this budget six core / twelve thread laptop.

Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks...

Last year we wrote about Dell working on a hardware privacy driver for Linux as with 2021 laptops they are beginning to add hardware-based privacy buttons for disabling microphone and camera support. That Dell Hardware Privacy platform support is now set to be introduced to the mainline kernel with Linux 5.14...

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer is going to bring a reworked user-space API for Intel's DG1 graphics card and their future discrete graphics offerings. This change to the Intel kernel graphics driver's user-space API, which is currently flagged as "broken" until it has been proven sufficiently capable for user-space needs and stable, is principally needed for handling of device local memory (dedicated vRAM)...

Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall as a quick/easy installer for the Linux distribution. Released today is now Archinstall 2.2 as the latest advancement for this convenient Arch Linux installer...

Frontier as the first US exascale supercomputer being commissioned by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. while being powered by AMD CPUs/GPUs is in the process of seeing more Linux kernel changes for bringing up the new platform...

Earlier this month were benchmarks looking at Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 21.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X desktop to which Ubuntu came out roughly 8% faster than the Microsoft OS on average. But what about the difference for HEDT systems? Given the more radical performance difference we have seen in the past with Windows vs. Linux for Threadripper systems, here are some recently conducted benchmarks on that front with the 64-core Threadripper 3990X.

Over the past year developers from Igalia, Collabora, and others have been involved in bringing up support for the OpenGL EXT_external_objects extension within the Intel open-source drivers. That work is now squared away as one of the pieces for offering better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan...

While other mobile operating systems have for years been on a 64-bit software stack and in the process of phasing out 32-bit app support, Jolla is celebrating Sailfish 4.1 as finally marking their first fully 64-bit Sailfish OS software stack -- for use currently just with the Sony Xperia 10 II smartphone...

Last month with the Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 driver there was finally Vulkan ray-tracing support added to that proprietary Vulkan driver component, the first time that Vulkan ray-tracing has been available on Linux for any AMD Radeon 6000 series graphics card across the multiple driver options. Last month I posted some initial Vulkan ray-tracing AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while questions were raised how well the driver performs with NVIDIA's Quake II RTX port. Here are some initial benchmarks for those wondering...

Qt Multimedia should return for Qt 6.2's release later this year and is perhaps the module changing the most in its transition from Qt5 to Qt6...

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, various downstreams are beginning to release their respective updates based against the RHEL 8.4 changes...

Merged today to Linux 5.13 Git and marked for back-porting to stable series is a new "confused deputy" weakness and affects kernels going back to Linux 2.6.12 from 2005...

Epic Games today pushed Unreal Engine 5 out to early access. Like with UE4, Unreal Engine 5 continues offering native Linux support and allowing use of the Vulkan API...

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with six cores / twelve threads within a Lenovo laptop at $449 USD is quite a steal. This is also my first time benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U after waiting months on Ryzen 5000 series laptop availability. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 5500U under Ubuntu 21.04 Linux against various other Intel/AMD laptops.