Phoronix

Earlier this year we reported on Linux kernel work for better handling Windows games/apps that make system call instructions that bypass the Windows API. Directly making the system calls without going through the WinAPI has become an increasingly common occurrence for modern Windows games, likely as part of their Digital Rights Management schemes. Syscall User Dispatch is now the latest take on that effort...

The second release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing ahead of its likely stable debut in early December...

Announced during the summer was Intel's Maple Ridge controller in the form of the Intel JHL8540 / JHL8340 chips as their first discrete Thunderbolt / USB4 controllers. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way...

The last piece of the puzzle to the open-source AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT driver support is now upstream in its respective location...

While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 was released, AMD has made good on their word to provide punctual AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for their new RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards and that has resulted in a new AMDVLK release...

Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server...

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software...

In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it...

Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits...

Now here is some darn interesting software news from SC20... AMD, which is in the process of acquiring Xilinx, is bringing the Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" stack to Xilinx hardware...

While Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support wasn't a focus for the initial Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards by AMD engineers, that is fortunately changing for both the RX 5000/6000 series moving forward. With the Radeon RX 6800 series there is at-launch support available with working OpenCL provided by the "ROCr" (runtime) path in their packaged driver. Now that we have looked at the Radeon RX 6800 Linux gaming performance here are some initial OpenCL compute benchmarks between NVIDIA and AMD Radeon on Linux.

Radeon Software for Linux 20.45 is now available as the Radeon RX 6800 series launch driver for Linux systems...

Today is the big day: Big Navi is shipping! This also means we can talk at length finally about the Linux support and performance for the Radeon RX 6800 series and how well they perform for Linux gaming. Here is a look at the Linux driver state for these initial RDNA 2 graphics cards and their performance capabilities with the multiple different open-source driver stacks available.

The Qt Company has released their public beta of the forthcoming Qt Design Studio 2.0, their software for quickly and easily designing user interfaces with an emphasis on UI design for non-programmers...

More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12...

For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa...

GraalVM continues its quest as the virtual machine not only supporting Java but also additional languages and execution modes with a focus on stellar performance and speedy startups. GraalVM CE 20.3 was released on Tuesday as the latest for this open-source package supporting Java, Node.js, an LLVM runtime, and more...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the recent proposal for introducing a new spin that features the KDE Plasma desktop for 64-bit ARM (AArch64)...

Joshua Ashton, known for his work with Valve on D9VK and then DXVK for mapping Direct3D on top of Vulkan, is making more strides in their Direct3D 12 effort with VKD3D-Proton...

With Firefox 83 released, like clock-work Mozilla has released the beta of Firefox 84...