Phoronix

GNOME Circle was talked about earlier this month at the Linux App Summit 2020 while now it's been officially announced...

While in recent weeks Linus Torvalds was becoming increasingly concerned over the size of the changes in Linux 5.10, 5.10-rc6 is out this evening and fortunately it has calmed down. At this point Linus is appearing relieved that Linux 5.10 will be in good shape for shipping on time and without any major concerns...

With this month's release of Chrome 87 having more performance improvements while Firefox 83 debuted with its "Warp" JavaScript improvements, it's a good time for some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks of these two main options. Plus with Firefox 84 to begin enabling WebRender by default in some Linux configurations, there is also a fresh run of Firefox with WebRender enabled.

Over the past year we have seen various Vulkan features landing in the FFmpeg repository and this past week brought more fixes and improvements around using the Vulkan API for accelerated filters and more...

Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree...

While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available...

The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live...

The Mediatek MT8167 SoC was announced four years ago already while for the Linux 5.11 kernel in early 2021 will finally be display support via the open-source Mediatek DRM driver...

For aspiring DJs wanting to mix beats under Linux, the Pioneer DJ DDJ-RR controller should be working come Linux 5.11 early next year...

Mike Blumenkrantz who has spent most of the year working on the "Zink" Gallium3D code for allowing universal OpenGL over Vulkan translation and took this Mesa code to OpenGL 4.6 compatibility and in some cases 90%+ the performance of a native OpenGL driver is now working on Zink development from a Radeon Navi graphics card with the RADV driver, which may in turn help uncover bugs and areas of optimizations for the open-source Radeon driver stack...

KDE developers remain as busy as ever even with pandemic and Christmas season upon us...

An exciting addition for GNOME 40 is that the Mutter compositor will be punting the input work off to a separate CPU thread...

Genode as an original operating system framework that has been in development for more than a decade is out with a new release. The Genode OS based Sculpt OS as their "general purpose OS" push is also updated...

RenderDoc 1.11 is out as the newest feature release for this leading open-source graphics debugger supporting platforms from Linux to Windows to the Nintendo Switch to even Google's Stadia and supporting all major graphics APIs...

One area not talked about much for Intel's latest Tiger Lake processors are hardened CPU security mitigations against the various speculative execution vulnerabilities to date. What's peculiar about Tiger Lake though is now if disabling the configurable mitigations it can actually result in worse performance than the default mitigated state. At least that's what we are seeing so far with the Core i7 1165G7 on Ubuntu 20.10 Linux is the opposite of what we have been seeing on prior generations of hardware.

Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have submitted their final batch of feature changes targeting the Linux 5.11 kernel...

Qt 6.0 is releasing in December and The Qt Company is already drafting plans for the release cycles of Qt 6.1 and Qt 6.2 LTS next year...

In September Arm began adding Neoverse N2 support to the open-source compilers initially with GCC and now the support has been merged into LLVM Clang 12 as well...

FUSE is well known to longtime Linux users for allowing file-systems to be implemented in user-space for where a Linux kernel port isn't feasible for portability or licensing restrictions, among other factors. There is also CUSE for character devices in user-space. Now being based on FUSE, there is "MUSE" being worked on for MTD in user-space...

Just some quick, friendly holiday reminders...