Phoronix

Two weeks ago Wine-Staging 6.4 was at nearly 700 patches while this weekend's release of Wine-Staging 6.5 lowers that to 661 patches thanks to a number of them being upstreamed...

Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, all but the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted...

While Debian 11.0 is brewing and currently under a hard freeze, Debian 10.9 is out this weekend as the latest stable update to Debian 10 "Buster"...

Standard mouse functionality of Apple's Magic Mouse 2 works currently under Linux but the "hid-magicmouse" mainline driver might finally be extended to fully support the Magic Mouse 2...

In addition to AMD Zen 3 "znver3" seeing a lot of last minute tuning/optimization work ahead of the GCC 11 compiler being released as stable in the weeks ahead, Arm has also been getting some last minute work into this open-source compiler as it pertains to the Neoverse V1 support...

Last year we wrote how the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud hosting costs were getting out of control so much so that they would either need to start finding sponsors and/or cut the continuous integration (CI) services offered to the hosted open-source projects, among other measures, as the costs were ballooning greatly. Thanks to a number of improvements to their hosting configuration, that is becoming a more manageable amount...

KDE developers are finishing the month of March strong with a number of new features and bug fixes for their open-source desktop stack...

Earlier this month I mentioned Loongson 2K1000 Linux patches were published with an effort now to upstream them some four years after these 40nm dual-core MIPS-based hardware launched. That Loongson-2K1000 support is now queued in MIPS-next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle...

Released on Friday was Cloud-Hypervisor 0.14, the Intel-led open-source effort creating a Rust-based and cloud-focused multi-platform hypervisor...

Wine 6.5 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot of this software for running Windows applications and games under Linux and macOS...

Last week we noted how a kernel driver for NZXT's Kraken AIO liquid cooling devices was under review for the mainline kernel. Shortly after that point the driver did get successfully picked up for hwmon-next and thus should be appearing in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

Earlier this month Samsung announced the 980 (non-PRO) NVMe solid-state driver offering a combination of speed and affordability for consumers. Many Linux readers have been curious about this Samsung 980 DRAM-less SSD so here are some initial benchmarks of it. Overall, it's been working out well under Linux.

Two fixes were queued this week into the Linux kernel's power management "linux-next" branch that could help improve the power management behavior for some devices as up to now the Linux kernel was not properly following the ACPI specification...

A small but measurable and seemingly widespread performance optimization is currently being buttoned up for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa to benefit latest-generation Gen12/Xe Graphics...

For those running Linux MD RAID10 arrays you may have found the performance around discard requests such as when running MKFS and FSTRIM operations to be rather slow... Well, with Linux 5.13 it will be lightning fast...

Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead...

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer...

Besides Valheim, there hasn't been much in the way of native Linux game releases recently to really get excited about with much of the activity these days being through Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. But in April there will be at least two high profile native Linux game releases...

This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

Launched last week with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was the AOCC 3.0 code compiler as AMD's downstream of LLVM Clang with various patches now catering to optimized for Zen 3. Last week some preliminary benchmarks of AOCC 3.0 on the Ryzen 9 5950X were carried out to good results. Since then I have begun putting AOCC 3.0 through its paces on a AMD EPYC 7003 series server to overall great results.