Phoronix

Subscribe to Phoronix feed
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 56 min ago

Mesa 21.2.1 Released With "Nice Changes For Almost Everyone"

Fri, 08/20/2021 - 03:10
For those that prefer to hold off on upgrading to a new Mesa stable release series until the first point release is out, Mesa 21.2.1 is now available as the first update to this quarter's Mesa 21.2 series...

Apple Patents Complicating W3C's Open Screen Protocol

Fri, 08/20/2021 - 02:16
The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple...

Intel Architecture Day 2021 & The Linux State

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 21:00
Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.

Canonical + DFI Pair Up For An "Industrial Pi" Powered By AMD & Ubuntu

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 19:55
Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer...

LibreOffice 7.2 Community Released For This Leading Open-Source Office Suite

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 19:00
LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite...

AMD To Optimize C3 Entry On Linux By Finally Skipping The Cache Flush

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 18:00
A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel...

Ubuntu 21.10 Likely Sticking To The GNOME 40 Desktop

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 17:39
While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41...

SDL2 Lands Long-Sought Geometry Render API

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 15:00
While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API...

Custom CPU/GPU Fan Curve Support For Some ASUS Laptops On Linux

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 12:00
Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux...

MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support, Other Improvements

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 07:11
After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more...

Intel Posts Linux Patches Bringing Up DisplayPort 2.0 - DG2 Alchemist To Support DP 2.0

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 02:30
It looks like 2022 is when we will start seeing DisplayPort 2.0 hardware broadly available... It was just earlier this week I wrote about AMD working on DisplayPort 2.0 for their open-source Radeon Linux driver and now coincidentally today Intel has begun their open-source Linux graphics driver enablement for DP 2.0...

Vulkan SC 1.0 Coming For "Safety Critical" Graphics / Compute

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 01:55
It's been over two years since The Khronos Group acknowledged they were working on safety critical Vulkan and now finally the 1.0 provisional release is approaching for this graphics/compute interface suitable for safety critical systems...

Krita 5.0 Beta Released With Better Performance, UI Polishing

Thu, 08/19/2021 - 01:37
Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program...

Debian 11 Performance Uplift Is Looking Great For Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 20:35
This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 "Bullseye" as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon "Ice Lake" and AMD EPYC "Milan" hardware.

PREEMPT-RT Locking Infrastructure Possibly Ready For Linux 5.15

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 17:42
Six dozen patches working on the PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure for real-time kernels is now queued up in TIP's "locking/core" branch and will presumably be sent in for the Linux 5.15 merge window coming up quickly...

Proposed: Allow Building The Linux Kernel With x86-64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 15:00
A set of two patches posted this week would allow the Linux kernel to be easily built with the different x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels supported by the latest LLVM Clang and GCC compilers...

Zink Now Supports OpenGL Compatibility Contexts - Allowing More Games/Apps To Work

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 12:00
In addition to Tuesday seeing the Zink sub-allocator merged for sharply improving the performance of this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa, the Zink Gallium3D code subsequently merged support for OpenGL compatibility contexts...

Maple Tree v2 Patches For The Linux Kernel - 13~840% Faster For Malloc Threads Test Case

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 06:52
Sent out last year was a "request for comments" on "Maple Tree" as a new data structure for the Linux kernel. The latest version of the Maple Tree patches were sent out today with mixed results but for where gains are being made they can be quite significant...

Zink Suballocator Lands In Mesa - "Over 1000%" Performance Increase For Some Games

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 02:42
Mesa's Zink Gallium3D code for implementing OpenGL-over-Vulkan can now run a heck of a lot faster with the newest Mesa 21.3 code...

Manjaro 21.1 Released With Better Btrfs Support, GNOME 40 Update

Wed, 08/18/2021 - 01:35
Manjaro 21.1 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux based operating system...

Pages