Phoronix

With Ubuntu 21.04 planning to use Wayland by default with GNOME aside from when running on NVIDIA graphics, you may be wondering about the current performance delta between running GNOME Shell on the X.Org session for Linux gaming versus its quite solid Wayland support. Or, rather, in the case of most games still - piped through XWayland. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland performance on Ubuntu with the Radeon RX 6800 XT.

While Qt 6.0 wasn't even released a full two months ago, the Qt 6.1 feature freeze went into effect this morning in trying to get out this next update sooner...

In the works over the past year for the GNOME desktop environment is dynamic triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in rendering the desktop. In doing so, the GPU utilization should increase and the GPU clock frequencies in turn should ramp up to meet the demand - thereby ideally getting the rendering back on track if prior frames were running late. That triple buffering support has been re-based to the GNOME 40 code-base but still is unlikely to land until the next cycle with GNOME 42...

Two years ago patches were posted in working on Wine support for IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware. The aim with that enablement has been to run Windows programs on POWER 64-bit hardware via Wine with the related "Hangover" project for handling the cross-architecture difference. The Wine patches for PPC64 have now been revived with hopes of mainlining them now that Wine 6.0 has passed...

From Linux 5.11 adventures to the AMD CES keynote to many open-source software advancements, there was a lot of activity during the month of January to take one's mind off the pandemic...

Linux 5.11-rc6 is out ahead of the stable release of Linux 5.11 coming in February...

For those wondering how say AVX heavy a particular program is being benchmarked or if a given program/benchmark supports making use of new instruction set extensions such as Vector AES or forthcoming AVX VNNI or AMX, the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org can now provide that insight on a per-test basis with common CPU instruction set extensions...

Taiwins debuted last year as a compact Wayland compositor and focused on being modular with Wayland scripting support. Up to now Taiwins relied upon the WLROOTS effort born out of the Sway project for doing much of the Wayland heavy-lifting but the developer has now replaced it with its own Wayland support library...

Immediately following the CXL 2.0 specification being made public in November, Intel developers began posting Linux enablement patches for CXL 2.0 with an initial focus on type-3 memory device support. It's looking like that CXL 2.0 enablement work is now closer to being mainlined in the Linux kernel...

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák continues squeezing Mesa for every bit of possible performance, which in recent months has been with a seemingly workstation focus...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.1 as the first development snapshot of the new series, Wine-Staging is out this morning with an updated release...

While it's sign-up time for open-source organizations hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2021 changes in the name of the pandemic are leading some organizations to debate whether it's still being involved with this student coding effort...

Bareflank is an open-source Linux hypervisor in development for several years and written around modern C++11/C++14 code and other modern functionality compared to longstanding virtualization hypervisors. Over the past few years it's been picking up many new features while this week Bareflank 2.1 released prior to a major overhaul coming with Bareflank 3.0 that will radically change the codebase...

Last year the Linux kernel began tightening up the ability to write to select CPU MSRs from user-space. That restricting of user-space access to select registers was done in the name of security as well as not wanting user-space to accidentally or maliciously poke some MSRs that could cause problems with kernel behavior. Now in kernel space there are some yet-to-be-merged patches that would place some new restrictions on kernel modules around poking certain registers or using select CPU instructions...

Added to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) last year was an integrated static analyzer via the "-fanalyzer" option for spotting potential code issues. For GCC 10 this integrated static analyzer operating off GCC's GIMPLE was in good shape for catching various bugs while for the upcoming GCC 11 it is now much more capable...

The Linux-friendly folks at OnLogic (nee Logic Supply) have launched a line of fanless, industrial-grade computers powered by Intel's Elkhart Lake...

While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned...

As part of work on GNOME 40, the GNOME Shell is seeing some big refinements like shifting of its workspaces to be horizontally laid out, which has now been merged...

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features...

Following the release of Wine 6.0 stable earlier this month, Wine 6.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development snapshot that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 7.0 stable release next year...