Phoronix

DXVK 1.7.3 is out as the latest stable update to this project implementing the Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan for accelerating the Linux gaming experience...

While Intel engineers over the course of the year began upstreaming various elements of the Keem Bay SoC support, the actual Vision Processing Unit (VPU) enabling hasn't been sent out for review until now. Intel has sent out their initial patches for bringing up the Vision Processing Unit on the open-source Linux kernel...

Bcachefs was sent out for another round of review at the end of October. While it doesn't look like this file-system born out of Linux's block cache code will be mainlined in the immediate near future, it's still on a nice trajectory...

Outreachy interns have been announced for the winter 2020 round. Selected participants are working on various open-source tasks from December through March in exchange for a $5,500 USD stipend to become involved with open-source...

Valve has just updated their Steam Survey results for November, showing how the Linux gaming marketshare continues to evolve during this pandemic-driven year...

Last month the Microsoft-backed Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver was merged into Mesa 21.0. This is the driver for allowing graphics/compute APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL to run on top of Direct3D with Windows 10. That work to the Gallium D3D12 code has been continuing with the start of the cross-platform code now being merged...

Following Tuesday's disclosure of more X.Org Server security bugs, X.Org Server 1.20.10 was released that provides those input fixes plus a number of other patches that have been back-ported and accumulated in the 1.20 series...

NVIDIA is working on allowing their proprietary driver to support passing buffers as DMA-BUF. In turn this should allow for better supporting their proprietary driver on Wayland compared to the EGLStreams mess...

Xe HP is Intel's discrete GPU aiming to compete against the latest-generation AMD and NVIDIA compute accelerators. Xe HP isn't scheduled to reach general availability until well into 2021 while now as they begin ramping up their sampling of Xe HP to potential customers, the Linux open-source driver support is preparing to roll-out...

Back in July SUSE announced its intention to acquire Rancher Labs. That deal has now closed for acquiring the Kubernetes focused cloud company...

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative has uncovered two more security issues with the aging X.Org Server that as we roll into 2021 is still powering most of the Linux desktops...

NVIDIA tomorrow is launching the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti with their Founder's Edition card and AIB variants are also expected. For about $400 USD, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti offers performance comparable or slightly faster than the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER and especially much stronger performance for compute and RTX workloads. With the review embargo now lifted a day ahead of the launch, here are the initial Linux benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti under Ubuntu Linux.

Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has just merged one of his largest set of optimizations in recent times: 2~5x faster performance for SPECViewPerf...

Linux Mint recently began developing a new open-source Linux IPTV player. That project "Hypnotix" is moving ahead and will be integrated with Linux Mint 20.1 while is also available as a standalone Debian package...

The momentum of WireGuard continues with FreeBSD now having mainlined their port of this open-source secure VPN tunnel...

Another month of the tumultuous year that is 2020 is now in the books... At least in November were several exciting hardware announcements to help pass the time along with the exciting evolution of open-source software...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) already supports LZO, LZ4, and Zstd compression while a proposal would also add support for LZ4HC...

For years there have been calls to deprecate Linux's FBDEV and work around replacing FBDEV drivers with modern Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers. While hardware vendors are now trending in the direction of DRM drivers (and the FBDEV emulation support if needed) after the embedded space was somewhat of a holdout, FBDEV drivers and the subsystem still exist as we roll into 2021. But at least one more FBDEV driver is now looking likely for removal in favor of its modern and maintained DRM counterpart...

OpenZFS 2.0 has been officially released! OpenZFS 2.0 marks a major step forward for open-source ZFS file-system support for what started out as ZFSOnLinux but is now OpenZFS with unified FreeBSD and Linux support (macOS support is still being pursued as well) and this release also bringing many new features...

With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base...