Phoronix

Besides Linux kernel developers still working to optimize code due to Retpolines overhead three years after Spectre rocked the ecosystem, another area kernel developers have still been actively working on is core scheduling for controlling the behavior of what software can share CPU resources or run on the sibling thread of a CPU core. That core scheduling work is finally closer to the mainline Linux kernel...

The Generic USB Display Driver "GUD" has just been sent in as part of the latest DRM-Misc-Next material to DRM-Next which in turn will land for Linux 5.13. The Generic USB Display Driver is nifty and allows for opening up possibilities like turning a Raspberry Pi Zero into a USB to HDMI display adapter among other fun use-cases...

When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware...

Last week there were a few round of Zen 3 compiler patches published and quickly merged into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its imminent release, This week there is some new activity albeit fixes for this new "Znver3" target...

For those that tend to wait until at least the first point release before moving to a new Mesa feature release, Mesa 21.0.1 is out today while Mesa 20.3.5 was also released as the last of that Q4'2020 driver series...

Announced nearly three years ago by NVIDIA as one of their open-source projects was the DALI library for GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading. The DALI library today reached the v1.0.0 milestone...

Intel's VA-API library (libVA) is out with a new end-of-quarter release for this open-source Linux video acceleration interface...

In addition to AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors offering fantastic performance, another important highlight for these new Zen 3 server processors is SEV-SNP for upping the Secure Encrypted Virtualization capabilities. AMD has been offering SEV "Secure Nested Paging" patches via a GitHub repository while now they are working towards mainlining this feature for the Linux kernel...

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source OpenGL driver for Linux systems is very well received and generally outperforming the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver on Linux/Windows and performing very strong against NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL driver too, it's not game over for this older graphics API and AMD is still working to lower the CPU overhead even further for this open-source code...

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available...

AMD today released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q1 driver packages for Windows and Linux systems...

Raised during the recent discussion over looking at removing Mesa's classic drivers from the mainline tree this year is that there still exists an effort trying to create an Intel Gallium3D driver for older pre-Broadwell graphics currently only served by the i965 classic driver. That Crocus effort continues to be worked on but isn't yet mainline...

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder...

While Microsoft often likes to proclaim their "love" for Linux, it's been independent open-source developer Maximilian Luz that has been spearheading improvements for Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. With Linux 5.13 his latest work on better handling Microsoft Surface device detachment handling should land...

Right now when it comes to Motorola 68000 "m68k" emulation with Linux the most powerful target is the Quadra 800 that is limited to just 1GB of RAM and specific interfaces. But on the way is the new "Virtual M68k Machine" that is much more powerful...

ROCm 4.0 released back in December with "CDNA" GPU support while now ROCm 4.1 has been released as the newest quarterly feature release to this open-source Radeon compute stack focused primarily on HPC/data-center needs...

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is hosting a webcast to provide an update on the company's manufacturing and other engineering efforts...

Manjaro 21.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux...

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning...