Phoronix

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation but recently has also been engaged in some of the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver work and related to that is the venerable LLVMpipe OpenGL Gallium3D driver. Needless to say, there's some interesting work happening...

Those having to deal with data stored on NTFS partitions from Linux have been eagerly awaiting the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software has been working now for a year to upstream into the Linux kernel. No pull request has been sent in yet but the twenty-seventh spin of this driver was published today...

Following the recent benchmarks seeing how AMD's new AOCC 3.1 compiler has brought some performance improvements over the prior AOCC 3.0 release that introduced initial Zen 3 optimizations, here are some benchmarks looking at how that latest AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler performance compares to the upstream LLVM Clang 12 compiler for which it is based as well as against GCC 11 as the latest GNU compiler release that remains common to Linux systems.

Manjaro 21.1 is on the way as the newest release of this Arch Linux based operating system that is popular for its desktop ease of use...

While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning...

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles...

Last month I wrote about a possible global counter for block/disk changes on Linux being discussed by Microsoft and systemd developers to better track changes via a system-wide monotonically increasing number as an alternative to the existing per-disk tracking. That functionality is now queued up as part of the block subsystem changes ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window in a few weeks...

The Mesa release train continues at full speed ahead for these open-source Linux graphics driver components...

Intel's open-source "Iris" Gallium3D driver for providing modern OpenGL driver support on their graphics hardware from Broadwell through all current Gen12 / Xe Graphics era hardware has been in great shape for some time and works wonderfully. But Intel's not done furthering this Linux OpenGL driver and today they now have threaded shader compilation merged...

OPNsense as the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based firewall and routing platform long ago forked from pfSense is out with its newest major release...

Less than one month since Open 3D Engine was announced based on Amazon's Lumberyard engine, the Linux support is nearly in a pleasant state...

The work going on for over a year to optionally flush the L1 data cache on context switching is going to try again for the next kernel cycle as an opt-in feature for select tasks. This was the feature rejected last year by Linus Torvalds that went on to "beyond stupid" and other concerns about it when it was trying to be mainlined originally...

While the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX performance is great on Linux once overcoming any laptop support quirks like with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 "AMD Advantage" laptop running into keyboard and WiFi issues on Linux depending upon the kernel version, how does the performance compare to Microsoft Windows 10? Here are some benchmarks of that ROG Strix G15 AMD laptop under Windows 10 as shipped by ASUS against Ubuntu 21.04 when upgraded to the Linux 5.13 stable kernel.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol is up to version 2.4 and exciting about this release is multi-threaded decoding support...

A lot of new code landed yesterday in the Btrfs file-system's "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

While PipeWire continues on a nice upward trajectory for fulfilling the roles of PulseAudio and JACK along with other audio/video stream management needs, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet and on Tuesday saw its big version 15.0 release...

GCC 11.2 is now available as the latest stable version of the GNU Compiler Collection...

The open-source Mesa RADV driver for independent Radeon Vulkan driver support on Linux has been working towards supporting ray-tracing for months. Progress is being made with the latest being more test cases passes and even the Quake II RTX game rendering correctly, but the performance is far short of being satisfactory yet...

Following the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and their open-source IBM-led work around watering farms from the cloud, the Linux Foundation's newest effort is around trying to enhance firefighter safety with open-source...

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally available as the latest major feature release to this widely-used NoSQL database management system...