Phoronix

Canonical has released the final beta of next month's Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release...

With Chrome 94 having shipped this week, Google has now promoted Chrome 95 to beta...

As a follow-up to A Fix Is Pending For That Linux 5.15 Performance Regression, Linus Torvalds decided to pull the fix directly into Linux 5.15 Git today for addressing this real-world, measurable performance regression...

Generating much excitement back in 2018 was bpfilter for the potential to better Linux's firewall and packet filtering by making it more robust and performance. Recently work on this BPF-based firewall solution was renewed and the performance potential over iptables and nftables is looking very good for the future...

Not too surprising given the Steam Deck is inching closer towards release and we've known Valve has been working to improve the anti-cheat situation for games on Linux, but today EAC owner Epic Games officially announced Easy Anti-Cheat for both Linux and macOS...

The promising FUTEX2 work focused on improving the Linux performance for running Windows games via Wine/Proton by extending futex to wait on multiple locks is still moving forward...

Last week was the article on noticing various workloads performing slower on the Linux 5.15 development kernel. There is now a patch pending that in testing so far does indeed correct the performance drop on this forthcoming kernel.

Microsoft's "CLOn12" effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 by leveraging Mesa now has landed a major rework to its code within Mesa...

Qing Zhao of Oracle presented yesterday during the LPC2021 GNU Tools Track around the work they and others have been engaged in for improving the security of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Most Linux distributions are currently coming up short from offering adequate security around full disk encryption and authenticated boot. Prominent Linux developer Lennart Poettering even argues that your data is "probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or macOS devices."..

The latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager changes are on their way to DRM-Next for Linux 5.16. Notable from this new drm-misc-next batch is the new "panel-edp" driver...

Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort...

Valve today published a "Steam Deck FAQ" page sharing some additional information on this forthcoming Arch Linux powered handheld game system that will begin shipping at the end of Q4...

Google's Android had been notorious for all of its downstream patches carried by the mobile operating system as well as various vendor/device kernel trees while in recent years more of that code has been upstreamed. Google has also been shifting to the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI) as the basis for all their product kernels to further reduce the fragmentation. Looking ahead, Google is now talking of an "upstream first" approach for pushing new kernel features...

Merged yesterday for Mesa 21.3 was open-source Vulkan ray-tracing for AMD RDNA2 / RX 6000 series GPUs with the RADV driver. Opened today now is a merge request that would provide Vulkan ray-tracing with RADV to pre-RDNA2 GPUs on this driver going back to the likes of Polaris, granted the performance is another story...

GNOME 41 is out as the latest half-year update to this open-source desktop environment...

Earlier this month AMD posted their initial public patches for the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that leverages ACPI CPPC for ultimately aiming to provide better power efficiency and more responsive CPU frequency scaling / performance state decisions on Zen 3 (and Zen 2 eventually) processors. This is part of the effort around AMD and Valve collaborating for better Linux efficiency especially with the AMD-powered Steam Deck.

While the GNU Compiler Collection has supported OpenACC for a few years now as this parallel programming standard popular with GPUs/accelerators, the current implementation has been found to be inadequate for many real-world HPC workloads leveraging OpenACC. Fortunately, Siemens has been working to improve GCC's OpenACC kernels support...

Aya was presented during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference for improving the eBPF developer experience by allowing Rust programs to easily run within the kernel...

UBports on Tuesday released Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 as the latest refinement to this Ubuntu Linux spin for smartphones and tablets...