Phoronix

XScreenSaver as the open-source screensaver solution for Linux as well as macOS systems this last week reached version 6.0. With XScreenSaver 6.0 comes increased security and other enhancements...

Normally we don't see the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system ported to new Linux kernel releases until after the inaugural stable release, but this time around Reiser4 has seen an early port to the near-final Linux 5.12 kernel...

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to ship at the start of March but now more than one month later and some 6,660+ commits to LLVM 13.0 already, LLVM 12.0 has not yet shipped but on Wednesday 12.0.0-rc5 was issued...

At the end of March the release candidate phase began for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.1 open-source ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD systems. The second release candidate is now available for this noteworthy OpenZFS update...

This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised...

Sway 1.6 is official today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor...

Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers...

Here is a look at the AVX / AVX2 / AVX-512 performance on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" when building a set of relevant open-source benchmarks limited to AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 caps each time while also monitoring the CPU package power consumption during the tests for looking at the performance-per-Watt in providing some fresh reference metrics over AVX-512 on Linux with the latest Intel "Rocket Lake" processors.

Not only is the Linux kernel moving to allow Rust code to be optionally used within the kernel, but Google is now allowing Rust code to be used for system programming work on Android's low-level operating system components too...

The official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, is out today with its first update of the new quarter...

In the open-source world there can even be much fragmentation and multiple implementations around something as central as parsing of EDID blobs for monitor (display) information and that's only been made worse by the growing number of Wayland compositors...

The latest area being worked on with VirtIO for para-virtualized drivers for Linux with a focus on KVM is Bluetooth support...

For many years it's been possible to run Linux games on FreeBSD along with other Linux applications thanks to FreeBSD's "Linuxulator" Linux binary compatibility layer. With that more recently it's becoming possible to run even more recent games thanks to improvements to FreeBSD's graphics drivers, the Linux binary compatibility code, and other FreeBSD improvements -- Steam is even working out for more titles...

Back in February we covered Google's work on the Lyra voice/audio codec designed for fitting with very low bit-rate audio for speech compression in use-cases like WebRTC and video chatting even on the most limited Internet connections. Thanks to leveraging machine learning, Lyra can function at just 3kbps. The code to Lyra is now public...

AMD last week published a security whitepaper on Zen 3's Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality introduced with Ryzen 5000 series and EPYC 7003 series processors. In the whitepaper they mentioned Linux patches were published for allowing this feature to be disabled if concerned about the security risk, well, today those patches were made public...

Intel today is introducing the 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" Xeon Scalable processors that top out with the Xeon Platinum 8380 offering 40 cores with a 2.3GHz base frequency and 3.0GHz all-core turbo while having a 270 Watt TDP and launching for ~$8099 USD. Here are more details on the Intel Ice Lake Xeon Scalable line-up.

Over the past two years we have seen a lot of Intel Linux kernel graphics driver work in preparing to support Intel discrete graphics cards. That work is still ongoing even for the DG1 graphics card that has been sampling to customers while Linux 5.13 will take things another step forward this summer...

While Skylake was introduced a half-decade ago already, Intel's open-source engineers aren't done relentlessly optimizing for it and subsequent 14nm processors. Hitting the GCC 11 open-source compiler today was an optimization for benefiting Skylake through the likes of Cascade Lake with some possible performance benefits...

Newer Gigabyte motherboards may soon enjoy a new Linux driver for exposing component temperatures...

The KDE project and the open-source Linux community has been in a sticky situation with The Qt Company having moved Qt 5.15 LTS to its commercial-only phase while most free software hasn't even been ported yet to Qt 6 let alone a number of modules and other features still missing from the Qt 6 tool-kit. So until the KDE project has fully transitioned to using the Qt 6 tool-kit, the project has taken up maintaining their own collection of Qt 5.15 patches...