Phoronix

Wine 6.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this widely-used software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other systems...

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code...

A number of Phoronix readers have been asking about some fresh file-system comparisons on recent kernels. With not having the time to conduct the usual kernel version vs. file-system comparison, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system benchmarks on a speedy WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe solid-state drive...

The Linux kernel has already sported SM4 cipher algorithm implementation optimized for AES-NI and AVX while now an Alibaba engineer has contributed an AVX2 optimized variant for even greater performance...

For nearly the past decade there has been calls for deprecating the Liux kernel's frame-buffer "FBDEV" device code though the code remains within the kernel. While these days most display drivers are DRM-based even in the embedded world, a lot of FBDEV code still ends up in kernel builds even when just wanting to use DRM's FBDEV emulation layer. But a patch proposal out of Red Hat would further split-up the FBDEV core support to allow less of it to be built...

On top of all the PCI IDs in place already for the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver, another 17 PCI IDs were added in a new patch for this open-source Radeon graphics driver...

While Ubuntu 21.10 isn't being released for another two months, the release schedule for Ubuntu 22.04 has been published that is rather notable in being the next bi-annual long-term support (LTS) release...

PipeWire, for managing audio/video streams on Linux and proving itself to be a viable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, is out with a new update...

Google promoted Chrome 94 to beta status today with some exciting changes...

Started back in 2018 was an effort by the NetBSD project to update their operating system WiFi drivers by re-syncing more code from FreeBSD and making various improvements. Three years later the work has yet to be merged but after stalling for some time is back to being worked on by interested developers...

Earlier this month was a look at the LLVM Clang 13 performance on EPYC 7003 showing this forthcoming compiler update to be in good shape for AMD Zen 3, but how is the performance looking on the Intel side? This round of benchmarking is looking at the LLVM Clang 11 / 12 / 13 compiler performance on Intel's flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" 2P server configuration.

After a slight delay, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is available today as the newest point release for the current Ubuntu Linux long-term support release...

The GNOME project has launched "Apps For GNOME" at apps.gnome.org for highlighting the ecosystem of available GNOME applications...

The Qt Company has formally released Qt Creator 5.0 today as their latest version of this Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment...

Google Chrome OS engineers are working on making Linux's VirtIO-GPU driver more extensible. The VirtIO-GPU driver has been modeled around the Virgl protocol for handling 3D within guest virtual machines but with a new context type addition they aim to support additional protocols...

Going back to June of last year there has been work on Intel bringing up Advanced Matrix Extension (AMX) that will debut with next-gen Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors as a new programming paradigm. Over the past year they have published patches for the Linux kernel and open-source toolchains with GCC and LLVM Clang. One year later, the AMX kernel patches are up to their tenth revision but will miss out on the imminent Linux 5.15 merge window...

It was just last month that the Linux kernel saw a pipe code change to address a user-space regression due to the kernel's policy about not breaking the user-space even if that non-kernel code is in the wrong. A similar kernel regression fix was merged today...

The work I initially wrote about last week for AMD optimizing their C3 entry handling to avoid an unnecessary cache flush will now be picked up for the upcoming Linux 5.15 kernel cycle...

OpenShot 2.6 has been released as the newest version of this non-linear open-source video editing system for Linux...

Earlier this month the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G desktop APUs officially launched for retail availability. Unfortunately we were not seeded with any review sample for being able to conduct Linux testing on these Zen 3 APUs with Vega graphics, but ended up purchasing one afterwards due to the number of readers inquiring about the Linux support. Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G.