Phoronix

While Skylake was introduced a half-decade ago already, Intel's open-source engineers aren't done relentlessly optimizing for it and subsequent 14nm processors. Hitting the GCC 11 open-source compiler today was an optimization for benefiting Skylake through the likes of Cascade Lake with some possible performance benefits...

Newer Gigabyte motherboards may soon enjoy a new Linux driver for exposing component temperatures...

The KDE project and the open-source Linux community has been in a sticky situation with The Qt Company having moved Qt 5.15 LTS to its commercial-only phase while most free software hasn't even been ported yet to Qt 6 let alone a number of modules and other features still missing from the Qt 6 tool-kit. So until the KDE project has fully transitioned to using the Qt 6 tool-kit, the project has taken up maintaining their own collection of Qt 5.15 patches...

The xf86-input-libinput driver that is used for leveraging the libinput input handling library on X.Org Server systems has reached the version 1.0 milestone...

While PipeWire is being increasingly looked at by desktop Linux distributions as the future of audio/video stream handling on the Linux desktop, aside from Fedora most Linux distributions are so far being cautious in replacing PulseAudio. In any event, PulseAudio is showing no signs of letting up and continues seeing new feature development...

For older Logitech keyboards that operate on a 27MHz radio frequency they may have a new lease on life as well as being more secure thanks to a new Linux utility...

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware...

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have been working publicly on the "Acturus" GPU support going back to 2019 that was then introduced last year in the form of the Instinct MI100, finally today has the necessary binary firmware been upstreamed into linux-firmware.git for enabling the rest of the open-source AMD Linux driver stack...

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game that was originally released in 1999 as a proprietary commercial game only to then be made open-source several years later, is out this week with its version 4.0 milestone...

Approved at the start of the year was the CentOS Hyperscaler special interest group that is working to cater CentOS Stream so it's more suitable by the likes of Facebook and Twitter along with other modern enterprises. The SIG just issued their Q1'2021 report about what they accomplished in this first quarter of being an approved effort and what work remains on the table...

For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing...

The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver...

Linaro continues leading the effort on a Wireless WAN (WWAN) subsystem/framework for the Linux kernel...

Linus Torvalds put out Linux 5.12-rc6 on schedule even with the Easter holiday and it's a delightfully small update...

This past week AMD published a security analysis of AMD Zen 3's new Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality. In there they did acknowledge there is the possibility where bad PSF functionality could lead to a side-channel attack albeit the real-world exposure would be quite low. In any case they are allowing interested users to disable the Predictive Store Forwarding functionality, but what they didn't comment on in that paper was what performance overhead to expect if disabling PSF. So my Easter weekend turned into AMD Zen 3 PSF benchmarking.

This month's Arch Linux install media update now provides "archinstall" as the guided installer for Arch Linux for those preferring a quick and easy route for deploying Arch Linux...

While most haven't even moved to PHP 8.0 yet in their Linux distribution default packages let alone in production environments, PHP 8.1 is under development and like clockwork should be out around the end of November as usual for their yearly release dance. In two months already the PHP 8.1 alpha releases should start up...

Kicked off this past Thursday and running through 7 April is the Ubuntu 21.04 "Testing Week" for helping to test the new changes and catch any remaining issues with there being now just three weeks to go to the final release...

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release...

The past year there has been work led by Greg Kroah-Hartman on a "READFILE" system call for efficiently reading small files such as for data exposed via sysfs. While not yet mainlined, this week the patches for this new system call were re-based giving us hope that perhaps we'll see it with Linux 5.13...