Phoronix

For those making use of Radeon GPUs for H.264 encoding on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver stack for VCN hardware has just merged support for handling H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) / temporal encoding...

It turns out there is actually people running modern versions of the Linux kernel in 2021 that also are using floppy disks...

The Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 as the latest version of their high performance virtual machine that continues advancing four years after IBM donated the original J9 code...

DXVK 1.9.1 is out as the newest version of this key component to Steam Play / Proton for running Windows games on Linux with DXVK being responsible for translating Direct3D 9/10/11 calls to Vulkan...

Motivated in part by the recent le9 kernel patches that are already carried by XanMod and not having benchmarked the XanMod or Liquorix Linux kernel downstreams in a while, here are some fresh benchmarks of Liquorix and XanMod against the recent upstream Linux kernel releases.

One year after Haiku R1 Beta 2, the third beta of this inaugural release of the open-source Haiku operating system is now available for testing. Haiku remains the open-source OS project going on two decades for advancing as the spiritual successor to BeOS...

The SDL2 library that is commonly used by many cross-platform games landed several patches this weekend to improve its Wayland support...

Following last week's big kernel in the form of Linux 5.14-rc2, rc3 is now available and it's much saner this week with fewer changes and those scattered changes being on the smaller side...

The BLAKE3 cryotpgraphic hash function that was announced last year and based on its predecessor BLAKE2 has now reached version 1.0 for its official/reference software implementation. BLAKE3 continues to be much faster than BLAKE2 while also being much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA--2/SHA-3 and even MD5 while being more secure...

When sticking to Wine recommendations of maintaining separate prefixes per-application, a lot of system files get duplicated for each game/application and in turn leading to significant bloat. With the current state of Wine it can mean hundreds of megabytes per prefix in duplicated files. But proposed reflink patches for Wine are aiming to cut down on this severe bloat...

This past week were the initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 laptop. Ubuntu was used as the default test platform as usual given its popularity and arguably the most relevant Linux distribution to use given that it's the most common Linux distribution at the moment for preloads on laptops by multiple vendors. In any case, as usual many users were quick to say "but Arch Linux!" as if it was going to make a dramatic difference in my findings. Well, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus Arch Linux benchmarks on that AMD Advantage laptop.

The latest Linux kernel feature proposed by Microsoft that is now working its way to the mainline kernel is IMA-based target measurements for the Device Mapper (DM) subsystem for enhanced security...

While Loongson has been known for their MIPS-based Loongson chips that are open-source friendly and have long been based on MIPS, with MIPS now being a dead-end, the Chinese company has begun producing chips using its own "LoongArch" ISA. The first Loongson 3A5000 series hardware was just announced and thanks to the company apparently using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org we have some initial numbers...

Fedora Workstation 35 is looking to ship with power-profiles-daemon by default and to have it enabled for benefiting newer laptops...

The FreeBSD project just published their Q2-2021 report concerning all of their different development activities from April through June...

KDE developers show no signs of slowing down during the pandemic or being distracted over the summer months as it was another busy week advancing this open-source desktop environment...

Intel "Cannon Lake" processors were rare in the first place with being limited to the Core i3 8121U but given that no production SKU ever materialized with the "Gen10" graphics enabled, Intel's Linux engineers are finally moving ahead in eliminating the rest of the Cannon Lake / Gen10 graphics support code...

The Debian release team has just announced their planned release date for Debian 11...

One of the low-level exciting kernel advancements being worked on at the moment is the new "folios" struct for improving Linux memory management. Tests by those involved found that in some conditions Linux kernel builds for example could be up to 7% faster. Given the recent folios v14 patches being published, I took them for a spin on an AMD EPYC server to see the impact on overall performance...

In addition to still working on moving from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04 LTS for its base, Ubuntu Touch has also begun engaging in another important project: supporting Voice over LTE (VoLTE) with Ubuntu Touch...