Phoronix

GCC compiler patches began appearing this morning for IBM Z "Arch14" as a future architecture extension for their Z mainframe processors. IBM Z Arch14 will likely correlate to IBM z16...

While Linux 5.12 has many great new features, what you won't find in the mainline kernel is the new "NTFS3" kernel driver developed by Paragon Software for NTFS file-systems. That driver is still coming for a future kernel and has now been sent out a twenty-second time for review...

The latest "Smart Access Memory" work by the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver stack is an option for the RADV Vulkan driver to force the "SAM" behavior even if the system is not advertising all the video RAM as visible or even if using APU graphics...

While SDL2-enabled games/applications can already work on PipeWire-based systems like the forthcoming Fedora Workstation 34 thanks to the PulseAudio compatibility layer, the SDL2 library has merged initial support for interfacing with PipeWire...

Of the performance-related changes with Linux 5.12 worth noting is faster AES-NI XTS performance for systems relying upon return trampolines "Retpolines" as part of the CPU's Spectre V2 mitigations. On the Intel side this primarily impacts older CPUs where Retpolines is still used while on the AMD side through Zen 3 the Retpolines is still relied upon, which as shown by these benchmarks is now much better off for AMD Ryzen AES XTS performance as measured by Cryptsetup...

The Linux kernel source tree following the eventful 5.12 merge window is at 28.81 million lines in the source tree across more than sixty thousand files. The largest in-tree kernel driver continues to be the AMDGPU kernel driver, which in the next kernel release or so should be crossing three million lines...

Building off the recent DXVK 1.8 release is a new point release with more performance optimizations, game fixes, and related work to this Direct3D-on-Vulkan translation layer that is extremely popular with Linux gamers...

The Radeon ROCm open-source compute documentation has been updated to more clearly spell out what was already implied: their focus is on compute for headless, GUI-less workloads and not OpenCL or compute for conventional desktop applications...

From FreeBSD 13 nearing release and helloSystem making waves to Linux 5.11 getting buttoned up while paired with the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference was able to capture much interest in the open-source community during another pandemic month...

Vulkan 1.2.171 is out this morning with several fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics / compute API specification while there is also a new extension for allowing BlackBerry QNX support...

The Qt Company is now offering some checks for the Clazy framework to help in porting Qt 5 code to Qt 6 compatibility...

While Mesa is most well known for providing OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers on Linux systems, via the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker is also maturing support for OpenCL. But until now it hasn't been straight-forward to track the state of Mesa's OpenCL supported versions and extensions...

ET Legacy 2.77 is out today as the newest version of this open-source game project continuing to advance the open-sourced Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game from the early 2000's...

Linus Torvalds issued the first release candidate tonight of Linux 5.12 following an unusual merge window...

The Linux 5.12 merge window was off to a rough start due to winter storms preventing Linus Torvalds from merging changes for nearly one week, but in any case he appears to have caught up and the Linux 5.12-rc1 kernel is expected later today to end out the merge window. Here is a look at the many exciting changes coming for Linux 5.12.

There have been plenty of new and updated benchmarks over the course of February ahead of upcoming CPU and GPU launches...

Last week the Linux Mint project shared the troubling news how many of its users are behind on important security updates or in some cases even running end-of-life versions. In trying to help address the issue, Linux Mint is working on improvements to its Update Manager to encourage users to apply updates...

Back in March 2019 Xilinx announced they were looking to upstream their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers into the mainline kernel code. They followed through with posting the initial kernel patches and then fast forward to the end of 2020 they posted a new iteration of the patches. This month the company, which is in the process of being acquired by AMD, posted the third iteration of their open-source Linux kernel driver patches...

For more than four years Apple's MacBook Pro has featured the Touch Bar as a display / control bar input device above the keyboard on these laptops. While there have been reports of Apple potentially phasing out the Touch Bar in future models, an open-source Linux driver for the component is still working its way toward the mainline kernel...

Zrythm 1.0.0-alpha.12.0.1 released this week as the interesting open-source, GTK-based digital audio workstation that has been moving closer to a 1.0 release...