Phoronix

Security firm Corellium has been working on enabling the Apple M1 SoC under Linux and last month they posted initial Linux kernel patches for the Apple M1. Meanwhile independent developer Hector Martin has also been working on Apple M1 enablement via crowdfunding and today he posted his initial set of Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple 2020 hardware under Linux...

The AMD "frequency invariance" saga with Linux 5.11 continues... While there was a patch to address the previously noted performance regression caused by the introduction of frequency invariance and seen when using the Schedutil governor, a new CPUFreq-side patch series has been proposed instead -- both of which are addressing the performance issue with this new kernel for AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 systems...

With Mesa 21.0 releasing soon here is a look at the new features for this quarter's release of these open-source Vulkan / OpenGL driver implementations.

Sent in today to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle were "fixes" but some interesting items worth noting in this batch...

The open-source Broadcom graphics driver code most notably used by Raspberry Pi devices will be seeing at least slightly better performance come next quarter's Mesa 21.1 release...

In addition to VKD3D-Proton working on support for DXR ray-tracing another high profile Direct3D 12 feature being implemented on top of Vulkan is support for variable rate shading...

For those wondering where Ubuntu's Mir is being used in current form with their continued development of it these days as a Wayland compositor, it turns out it is being used within smart exercise mirrors as at least one implementation...

Following in the footsteps of Apache Superset and Apache ECharts, DataSketches has been promoted to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation...

Zink as the generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API while leveraging Mesa's Gallium3D can now work atop NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver...

Google engineers are proposing a new framework called "Know, Prevent, Fix" in dealing with open-source security vulnerabilities...

For fans of the Solus Linux distribution, Solus 4.2 is now available as the project's latest release for this optimized, desktop-minded platform...

Following the December release of Qt 6.0, the Qt 6.0.1 toolkit is available today with the first batch of bug fixes to further stabilize the Qt6 code-base...

Users of various Intel Tiger Lake graphics and other "Gen12" graphics SKUs like the DG1 discrete graphics cards could soon be seeing a huge performance speed-up with the open-source Linux driver...

The V3DV open-source Vulkan driver in Mesa for Broadcom graphics most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer continues maturing nicely...

LibreOffice 7.1 has just been released as the latest version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite that now carries "Community" branding and promoting of "Enterprise" variants as well...

Intel engineers have been working on "Vdmabuf" as a VirtIO-based DMA-BUF driver for the Linux kernel. This driver is intended for their growing multi-GPU use-cases and also in cases of GPU virtualization where wanting to transfer contents seamlessly to the host for display purposes...

On top of Godot 4.0 having a Vulkan renderer, native Wayland bits, and other graphics improvements, it's also seeing significant CPU and GPU optimizations...

Intel's Embree open-source ray-tracing library has won an Academy Award in the form of a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award...

Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops...

Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users...