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Earlier this year we mentioned Greg Kroah-Hartman working on a new READFILE system call. The goal of this new syscall is for reading small and medium files more efficiently by having one call to read a file straight into a buffer without having to use the separate open/read/close system calls. It's looking like that system call is back on the table and could be mainlined now that there's a possible user...

LibreOffice 7.1 was branched this weekend that also marked the hard feature freeze for this next half-year update to this open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta has now shipped ahead of next month's release candidate and the additional test releases in January before going gold in early February...

There are two interesting bits of news today pertaining to open-source Vulkan drivers being officially conformant with the Vulkan 1.0 specification in passing the necessary Vulkan CTS tests...

An interesting solution built off Intel's oneAPI Level Zero is the open-source "ZLUDA" that is providing a "Level Zero CUDA" implementation for being able to run programs geared for NVIDIA CUDA atop Intel UHD / Xe Graphics hardware...

WireGuard's adoption continues growing with it recently having the accomplishments of being back-ported to Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, coming to Android 12, upstreamed into OpenBSD, and other accomplishments this year. The WireGuard developers have now also updated their port of this secure VPN tunnel technology for Micrsoft Windows...

Longtime open-source developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been an Enlightenment developer for many years and was working for Samsung's Open-Source Group prior to its demise jumped into the open-source Linux graphics world this year. While being unemployed he began hacking on the Zink Gallium3D code that allows generic OpenGL acceleration over the Vulkan API. He quickly got the code to the point of OpenGL 4.6 support and quite compelling performance compared to where Zink was at earlier this year. Now it turns out he will continue with his Linux graphics adventures thanks to funding from Valve...

While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0...

GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution...

Last week we delivered AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT Linux benchmarks and the performance was great both for Linux gaming as well as the OpenCL compute performance. But for as good as those Big Navi numbers were on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, they are now even better.

Intel held a virtual event last week to basically plead their case that AMD Ryzen laptops are gimping on battery-powered performance compared to their own offerings. It was all Windows focused, but at least given their emphasis now on battery performance gave me another opportunity to prod over the lackluster state of Intel DPTF support on Linux with it not being pleasant out-of-the-box and one of the few areas encumbered by blobs or lack of public documentation...

While NVIDIA has supported its own vendor-specific Vulkan ray-tracing extension on Windows and Linux since the GeForce RTX GPUs originally debuted, they are moving quick to support the Khronos ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan given the industry adoption and games coming to market likely opting for using the KHR version...

With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year's worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January...

Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support...

Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA...

This New Year's Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration...

Linux 5.10-rc4 last weekend was still rather heavy on changes but this evening now brings Linux 5.10-rc5 and unfortunately the situation has not improved.....

The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is now up to a beta state for their big version 19 "Matrix" release...

MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season...

Flatpak and the Flathub "app store" and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub...

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