Phoronix

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...

Void Linux, a rolling-release distribution we have covered before that is known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions like using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, has recently been working on enhancing its POWER CPU architecture support...

Greg Kroah-Hartman this week sent in "the large set of char/misc/whatever driver subsystem updates", which as usual -- given it's a catch-all area of kernel drivers not fitting well into other subsystems -- there is an interesting mix of additions...

For those enjoying the Valheim, the new survival/sandbox game that has been an incredible success and sold more than four millions of copies so far while being a low-budget indie game, Mesa should be providing better performance when using its OpenGL renderer...

Two weeks ago Wine-Staging 6.2 came in at 669 patches while now with the Wine-Staging 6.3 point release has climbed to just under 700 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base...

KDE developers have been wrapping up February with a number of new command line tools being worked on for applying various cosmetic changes to the desktop. There have also been many crash fixes addressed in recent days...

Google's AI team has announced "Lyra" as a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for use-cses like WebRTC and other video chats... With a bit rate so low that when combined with the likes of the AV1 video codec could potentially allow video chats over 56kbps Internet connections...

Mageia 8 is out today as a significant and long overdue update to this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva/Mandrake lineage...

Wine 6.3 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot of this free software solution for running Windows games and applications under Linux and macOS...

Linus Torvalds just merged a set of patches that includes KFence. Short for the Kernel Electric Fence, KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator that is suitable for use in production kernel builds...

The Linux 5.12 merge window is drawing to a close this weekend while being sent in this morning were the RISC-V updates that tend to excite the free software enthusiasts...

As a quick PSA for those that may be eager to test out early Git builds of the Linux 5.12 kernel, I've been hitting a very nasty issue on multiple systems leading to corruption / data loss...

Last week saw the main set of ACPI and power management updates for Linux 5.12 while for the second week of the merge window has been the follow-up work with Intel Simple Firmware Interface removal and also an additional ACPI update...

Last week the main set of DRM subsystem updates were sent in for the Linux 5.12 merge window. That pull included exciting additions like Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive and Intel Xe VRR. Mistakenly left out of that pull request last week were the open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver improvements for the "MSM" kernel driver while now that code has landed...

The newest GNU project seeing its first release is GNU Poke, which is being inaugurated at v1.0 after being in development for the past three years...

Genode OS 21.02 is out as the latest feature release to this open-source operating system framework...