Phoronix

The work-in-progress FUTEX2 system call for improving Windows games on Linux via Wine / Steam Play remains one of the items left to be addressed in 2021 with the work on that being funded by Valve and tackled by Collabora engineers...

KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further...

At last month's Linux.Conf.Au virtual conference was a presentation by Google engineer Nick Desaulniers on the current state of building the Linux kernel with LLVM Clang as an alternative to GCC...

Mozilla has been sponsoring the Rust programming language for more than a decade while in 2020 as part of Mozilla's big round of layoffs most of the Rust team was let go along with dropping the Servo web engine team. Following that plans were drafted to create the Rust Foundation as an independent entity...

Given the open-source Radeon driver progress for RDNA2 over the past three months since the Radeon RX 6800 series were launched, here is a look at how the Radeon RX 6800 series and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series is currently competing on Linux when using the latest Linux drivers from the respective vendors.

Hitting Mesa 21.1 this morning is a scheduler implementation for Panfrost Gallium3D, the open-source Arm Mali graphics driver...

Intel PXP -- Protected Xe Path -- is a means of hardware-protected sessions for graphics clients on Gen12 / Xe Graphics. The support code for enabling PXP with their open-source Linux driver stack was updated this past week...

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.3 is out this morning as the latest snapshot of the official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their shared platform driver sources...

Jolla's Sailfish OS 4.0.1 was released this past week to early access subscribers as a major milestone for Sailfish OS 4...

The MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver originally developed as part of the Freedreno effort for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics on Linux while now supported by the likes of Google and Qualcomm's Code Aurora engineers has some notable changes in store for the next Linux kernel cycle...

For those looking for something more interesting than the Super Bowl today, the seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing...

More than a decade ago Intel was very excited about MIDs as "Mobile Internet Devices" with their early Menlow and Moorestown platforms. Intel's MID plays ultimately were unsuccessful in the long-term and the MID functionality ultimately evolved into smartphones and tablets. In 2021, the Intel MID support is being gutted from the Linux kernel...

While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM...

With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates...

Dropping a conditional (if) statement from the RADV driver in Mesa is helping the performance of discrete Radeon graphics cards with the RADV Vulkan driver for some games...

In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release, Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8...

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1...

Debian 10.8 as the Linux distribution's latest quarterly update is now available ahead of Debian 11 expected later in the year...