Phoronix

Users of various Intel Tiger Lake graphics and other "Gen12" graphics SKUs like the DG1 discrete graphics cards could soon be seeing a huge performance speed-up with the open-source Linux driver...

The V3DV open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Broadcom graphics most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer continues maturing nicely...

LibreOffice 7.1 has just been released as the latest version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite that now carries "Community" branding and promoting of "Enterprise" variants as well...

Intel engineers have been working on "Vdmabuf" as a VirtIO-based DMA-BUF driver for the Linux kernel. This driver is intended for their growing multi-GPU use-cases and also in cases of GPU virtualization where wanting to transfer contents seamlessly to the host for display purposes...

On top of Godot 4.0 having a Vulkan renderer, native Wayland bits, and other graphics improvements, it's also seeing significant CPU and GPU optimizations...

Intel's Embree open-source ray-tracing library has won an Academy Award in the form of a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award...

Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops...

Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users...

Given the daily progress and changes made to the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and the Mesa drivers providing the open-source OpenGL (RadeonSI) and Vulkan (RADV) support, here is a look at how the Radeon RX 6800 series performance is currently for the latest Linux graphics driver code compared to the performance seen back on the November launch day for the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.

Canonical today is shipping Ubuntu Core 20 as their minimal, containerized version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focused on IoT and embedded uses...

Mesa 21.1 has merged a common dispatch framework for use by Vulkan drivers to allow for better code sharing and the possibility of some Vulkan extensions to be more easily supported across all drivers...

Released last month was Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 while now it's been succeeded by Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.1 as a point release to this quarter's stable series...

For the better part of a year now we've seen patches for Intel's kernel graphics driver working on fair low-latency scheduling that in part has been inspired by the design of BFS/MuQSS. While it's too late for seeing the work land with Linux 5.12, the latest batch of 57 patches were sent out this week...

A combination of new year updates and updating benchmarks ahead of Ice Lake Xeon / Rocket Lake / Ryzen 5000 series mobile / EPYC 7003 Milan has led to a number of new and updated test profiles being available via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org...

The user interface changes for GNOME 40 are quickly nearing the finish line with just two weeks to go until the UI freeze...

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey figures out of Valve for the month prior. For January 2021 there is an increase in the Linux gaming percentage as it gets back to flirting with the 1% mark...

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine that has been in use for more than a quarter century and present since Windows NT 3.51 and Microsoft Exchange 4.0 is now open-source...

OpenZFS 2.0.2 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on Linux and FreeBSD systems...

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10...

The GNU C Library 2.33 release is out today as expected. Exciting with this libc update is HWCAPS in making it easier to load optimized libraries for modern CPUs...