Phoronix

Mozilla Firefox 95.0 is now available for download ahead of its official release tomorrow. Making this new version interesting is the RLBox integration...

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package...

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension...

It's been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD's defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday's release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4...

OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun's OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities...

This week's set of "x86/urgent" changes for the Linux 5.16-rc4 kernel due out later today has some Spectre V1 fixes after kernel commits last year ended up partially messing things up around its SWAPGS handling. These fixes in turn will also likely be back-ported to relevant stable kernel series...

A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors...

XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling...

While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched...

Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features...

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake...

Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities...

AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware...

Taking place this week was the annual Open-Source Firmware Conference "OSFC" devoted to open-source firmware from Coreboot to open-source BMC solutions and other low-level booting/initialization efforts...

This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations...

The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline...

Wine 6.23 is now available for running Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs. Up next will be the Wine 7.0 release candidate that also marks the feature freeze for what will be the next annual Wine stable release...

EndeavourOS as the two year old Linux distribution project built atop Arch Linux is out with a shiny new release. Beyond package updates, the new release has several default changes like now making use of the wonderful PipeWire. Looking to 2022, EndeavourOS is also exploring the possibility of a gaming-optimized build of their OS...