Phoronix

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.3 is out this morning as the latest snapshot of the official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their shared platform driver sources...

Jolla's Sailfish OS 4.0.1 was released this past week to early access subscribers as a major milestone for Sailfish OS 4...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver originally developed as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics on Linux while now supported by the likes of Google and Qualcomm's Code Aurora engineers has some notable changes in store for the next Linux kernel cycle...

For those looking for something more interesting than the Super Bowl today, the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

More than a decade ago Intel was very excited about MIDs as "Mobile Internet Devices" with their early Menlow and Moorestown platforms. Intel's MID plays ultimately were unsuccessful in the long-term and the MID functionality ultimately evolved into smartphones and tablets. In 2021, the Intel MID support is being gutted from the Linux kernel...

While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM...

With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates...

Dropping a conditional (if) statement from the RADV driver in Mesa is helping the performance of discrete Radeon graphics cards with the RADV Vulkan driver for some games...

In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release, Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8...

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1...

Debian 10.8 as the Linux distribution's latest quarterly update is now available ahead of Debian 11 expected later in the year...

LibreSOC remains the very ambitious project of creating a fully open-source hybrid CPU/GPU SoC but with a very uphill battle still in front of them...

Security researchers out of the University of Birmingham have crafted another attack against Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) when having physical motherboard access and using their "VoltPillager" hardware device they assembled for about $30 USD...

The seL4 micro-kernel that has been in development for over a decade saw the creation of the seL4 Foundation last year to further the project's goals. In 2020 the seL4 micro-kernel also added RISC-V as one of its primary CPU architectures...

While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!..

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend...

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September...

While the AMDGPU back-end has been part of mainline LLVM for years, not until now has it supported an OpenMP toolchain for offloading to Radeon GPUs...

The GNU Network Utilities (inetutils) has seen its first major release in nine years or even the first release at all in six years since the prior point release. With GNU inetutils 2.0 are several updates to common programs like ping and ifconfig...