Phoronix

Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release...

If changes around pfSense land have you looking at other possible open-source firewall/router options, OPNsense that forked from pfSense six years ago is out with its newest feature release...

Following the LLVM 12 code branching earlier this week, the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 12.0 is now available for testing...

GNU Parted 3.4 is out as the first update to this open-source partition editor in sixteen months...

With Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm becoming quite popular and well supported across many different environments -- including support for Zstd compressing the Linux kernel, among other uses -- there is a renewed effort in allowing Linux firmware to be compressed via Zstd...

For those that have been trying to find a desktop-friendly BSD operating system that works smoothly out of the box but haven't yet found the perfect match, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 is now available for improving this desktop-minded FreeBSD-derived open-source operating system...

Wayland 1.18 released back in February 2020 while now nearly one year later it's been succeeded by Wayland 1.19...

IO_uring continues to be one of the most exciting technical innovations in the Linux kernel in recent years not only for more performant I/O but also opening up other doors for new Linux innovations. IO_uring has continued adding features since being mainlined in 2019 and now the newest proposed feature is the ability to build new ioctls / kernel interfaces atop IO_uring...

With a pending patch, the Linux 5.11 AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 performance is looking very good as far as the out-of-the-box performance is concerned when using Schedutil as is becoming the increasingly default CPU frequency scaling governor on more distributions / default kernels. With the previously noted Linux 5.11 regression addressed from when the AMD CPU frequency invariance support was first introduced, the Schedutil performance from small Ryzen systems up through big EPYC hardware is looking quite good. But how much upside is left in relation to the optimal CPU frequency scaling performance with the "performance" governor? Here is a look at those benchmarks on Ryzen and EPYC for Schedutil vs. Performance on a patched Linux 5.11 kernel.

Finally with the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle is support for Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync for Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe Graphics and newer...

Announced a few years ago was the notion of "extended" LTS kernel versions whereby the long term support cycle would span six years rather than the usual two years for LTS kernels in providing maintenance and bug/security fixes to the codebase. This means Linux 5.4 LTS is supported until the end of 2025, Linux 4.19 until the end of 2024, and even Linux 4.19 until the end of 2024. But with the recently minted Linux 5.10 LTS at least for now it's only being committed to maintenance until the end of next year...

A new Radeon power management feature with RDNA2 graphics processors being exposed by the open-source Linux driver is Duty Cycle Scaling in the name of power/thermal management with a focus on low-power hardware...

Feature development on LLVM 12.0 has ended along with associated sub-projects like Clang and libc++. Feature work now shifts to LLVM 13.0 while the LLVM 12 stable release should be out in just over one month's time...

Nearly a decade ago we were intrigued by Unvanquished as one of the most interesting open-source game/engine projects of the time. It was peculiar in going through dozens of alpha releases prior to drying up a few years ago. There hasn't been any major release yet past the prior alpha state but the project is in fact still moving along and issued their first new (point) release of the year as well as rolling out a new online updater...

A late change to GCC 11 is recognizing the -std=c++23 compiler option but without actually enabling any new features of this next major version of the C++ programming language...

Just last week Apache Superset was promoted to being a top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Superset is around big data visualizations and business intelligence solutions through data exploration while now Apache ECharts has joined it as the latest top-level project...

For nearly one year Broadcom engineers have been working on Linux mainline drivers for their VK accelerators. Finally with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel the support is in place for those Broadcom Viper and Valkyrie accelerator cards...

Intel today announced Iris Xe (DG1) discrete graphics cards are coming to OEMs with ASUS and Colorful being among the initial partners...

NVIDIA has released 460.39 as their latest stable Linux proprietary graphics driver build...

A few days ago we wrote about Linux 5.12 to see support for the Nintendo 64 more than two decades after that MIPS-based video game console first shipped. While the practicality of Linux on the Nintendo 64 is particularly limited given only 4~8MB of RAM and the MIPS64 NEC VR4300 clocked under 100MHz, it's going upstream and now the N64 controller driver is also queued for this next kernel cycle...