Phoronix

Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis...

The hid-input kernel driver with Linux 5.14 is set to see support for "Programmable Buttons" as outlined by the USB HID specification...

Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged...

With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage...

Linux 5.13 will debut tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with the state of the code-base, which in turn will mark the opening of the Linux 5.14 merge window. Here is a look at what is on the table for this next follow-on version of the Linux kernel...

A proposal by NVIDIA engineers for the mainline Linux kernel would introduce the Hardware Timestamping Engine (HTE) subsystem...

Software running on DragonFlyBSD and making use of pthreads is set to see better performance around low-level locks when heavily contested...

While some Huawei engineers are currently facing criticism for submitting superfluous kernel patches in an effort to boost their own or the company's standing in the kernel community, other engineers are Huawei are working on more substantive kernel patches. Here's a rather peculiar new patch series out on Friday where a Huawei engineer is effectively proposing an in-kernel transactional database...

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...