Phoronix

Ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window expected to open at end of day tomorrow, assuming Linux 5.11 is out on schedule, there is already a pending pull request with a big feature addition: IDMAPPED mounts...

Two weeks ago with Wine-Staging 6.1 it was at nearly 800 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base while for Wine-Staging 6.2 it has fallen to just a 669 patch difference...

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development...

An informal case study suggests that since Debian enacted its Code of Conduct and began participating in the Outreachy internship program hasn't helped in increasing female participation within the open-source project but is actually trending lower compared to the early years of this original GNU/Linux distribution...

One year after OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 released, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is now available. Continuing to make OpenMandriva Lx rather unique among Linux distributions is its use of the LLVM Clang compiler by default rather than GCC. Another unique "selling point" of OpenMandriva is its AMD Zen optimized version where the entire package set is rebuilt with Zen optimizations...

Proton 5.13-6 is out in time for the weekend Linux gamer in providing the latest functionality for this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux...

What better way to celebrate Valentine's Day weekend with some wine... Wine 6.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for running Windows games and applications on Linux/macOS...

Over the past year there has been much chatter about Enterprise Linux Next within the Fedora camp and now this special interest group (SIG) is finally getting underway...

Now with the CPUFreq fix landing this week in Linux Git, the mainline Linux 5.11 kernel in its near final state is looking in very good shape for AMD Zen 2/3 hardware from Ryzen laptops and desktops through EPYC servers. The Linux 5.11 development kernel was regressed for the better part of the past two months but now that the frequency invariance regression is addressed, not only is the regression gone but generally is performing much better compared to prior kernel versions.

Linux 5.11 stable is expected to be released on Sunday barring any second thoughts by Linus Torvalds that could lead to an eighth weekly release candidate that would in turn push the official release back by one week. In any case, Linux 5.11 will be formally out soon and it's an exciting one on the feature front...

With Linux 5.11 there is open-source Nouveau KMS support for Ampere GPUs -- just kernel mode-setting without any form of 3D acceleration. The actual hardware acceleration requires more work and also NVIDIA to release the necessary signed firmware binaries. With Linux 5.12 there still is no 3D acceleration but a big set of patches was merged as a step in that direction...

OBS Studio, the cross-platform open-source solution for live streaming and screen recording, has landed the last major piece of its effort to natively support Wayland...

For as rough of a year as 2020 was, one of the many open-source accomplishments was Sony taking up "official" maintenance of their HID driver and ahead of Christmas to much surprise they published an official PlayStation 5 DualSense open-source controller driver for Linux. That PS5 controller driver is now set to be introduced with the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window...

Among Intel's many open-source software accomplishments for 2020 was introducing OSPray Studio as part of oneAPI. OSPray Studio builds atop the existing OSPray ray-tracing engine and inter-connected oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components to offer an open-source scene graph application for interactive visualizations and ray-tracing based rendering. The newest OSPray Studio is now available...

It was just yesterday we were talking about Zink achieving OpenGL 4.3 support and wondering if OpenGL 4.4 or potentially even 4.5 could be buttoned up in time for Mesa 21.1... Well, as of a few minutes ago Zink now is advertising OpenGL 4.5 support for this graphics API layer built atop Vulkan...

With this spring marking two years already since Intel introduced the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors plus with Ice Lake Xeon processors being on the horizon, here is a look at how the flagship Xeon Platinum 8280 2P performance has evolved atop open-source Linux during that duration. The benchmarks today are looking at the performance of Ubuntu 19.04 for that of roughly the shape the Linux performance/optimizations were at launch and then the performance today if moving to the in-development Ubuntu 21.04 and also shifting to the latest Linux 5.11 kernel and GCC 11 code compiler.

It looks like thanks to AMD's increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is hiring more Linux engineers. AMD currently has several interesting job openings on the Linux front...

Mir, Canonical's Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes...

Back in September I wrote about Intel developers posting Linux enablement patches for their Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 PCIe accelerator for hardware-based load balancing functionality. That work hasn't yet been upstreamed but recently marked its tenth revision to the "DLB 2.0" patches...

Mesa's LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6...