Phoronix

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan open-source driver "RADV" is preparing to introduce experimental support for mesh shaders...

Mozilla Firefox 94 will begin using its EGL back-end on the Linux desktop in conjunction with supported graphics drivers in order to provide better performance, lower power usage, and other benefits...

KDE Plasma 5.23 offers much better Plasma Wayland support than prior releases but still the journey of polished Wayland support on-par with X11 is not over. KDE developers ended out October working on more Wayland fixes along with other improvements to this open-source desktop...

OpenVDB is the software open-sourced by DreamWorks Animations that is now part of the Academy Software Foundation as a sparse volume data structure and associating tooling with a particular focus on visual effects and animations for film production. OpenVDB 9.0 is out today as the latest major update to this library...

While Ardour is arguably the most well known open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solution, there are also other offerings like Zrythm and others while now "Stargate" is the newest option available...

Project Trident had been an operating system originally based on TrueOS/FreeBSD before shifting to Void Linux as its base and worked on various innovations like OpenZFS-based root installations but now the developers behind the ambitious advanced desktop OS project have decided to call it quits...

While there has been less major progress to report on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan code in recent weeks, Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve and others continue optimizing and fixing this increasing useful implementation. Most recently the game Bioshock: Infinite is running on Zink and there are more fixes in aiming toward OpenGL 4.6 conformance...

In early September AMD posted their new "amd-pstate" CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux that leverages ACPI CPPC data available with Zen 2 and newer processors for making wiser frequency scaling decisions. The goal of AMD P-State is to offer better performance-per-Watt and today they have posted a new revision of this driver...

Well known AMD open-source OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has landed another big batch of patches to further lower the driver overhead of this Linux OpenGL driver...

Earlier this year was talk of finally retiring the Intel "i965" Mesa classic OpenGL driver along with the rest of the "classic Mesa" driver code now that it's been replaced by the Crocus Gallium3D driver and the other open-source Mesa OpenGL divers all using the modern Gallium3D architecture. Those plans are still on but shifting now into 2022...

With X.Org Server 21.1 having finally shipped this week, the X.Org Server Autotools build system support has been killed off...

A set of patches improving the return trampoline "Retpoline" code used for Spectre V2 mitigations has made its way into tip.git's "objtool/core" staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window...

It's been nine months since the release of Wayland 1.19 while now release plans have been drafted for Wayland 1.20...

Running the newest Steam client beta paired with the newest Proton Experimental should yield more Windows games working on Steam Play with Linux...

Amazon Web Services today announced the open-source Babelfish for PostgreSQL server project. Babelfish allows for applications written against Microsoft SQL Server to work seamlessly with PostgreSQL...

After dealing with blocker bugs the past two weeks, Fedora 35 is now confirmed for releasing next week...

Disclosed last year by Arm was their processors affected by a straight-line speculation vulnerability. In this case the processor could speculatively execute instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. There has been talk about possible straight-line speculation on x86/x86_64 but without any action while now GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler developers along with Linux kernel developers are preparing such mitigation support...

The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged...

As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.