Phoronix

While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned...

As part of work on GNOME 40, the GNOME Shell is seeing some big refinements like shifting of its workspaces to be horizontally laid out, which has now been merged...

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features...

Following the release of Wine 6.0 stable earlier this month, Wine 6.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development snapshot that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 7.0 stable release next year...

For those continuing to rely on SATA 3.0 storage, last week Samsung introduced the 870 EVO as their latest solid-state drive in the very successful EVO line-up. For those curious about the Linux performance of the Samsung 870 EVO or wanting to run your own side-by-side benchmarks against the data in this article, here is a review looking at the Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SSD.

While most Linux users likely don't get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it's pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward...

While Intel's large open-source Linux graphics driver team has been pushing a lot of code over the past number of months for bringing up their DG1 graphics and other current/forthcoming discrete graphics offerings, one area that is still in its infancy is around the multi-device handling. At least from the compute side, there is some recent progress being made for multi-device support...

On top of aiming to use Wayland by default, another high profile change being worked on for this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is using link-time optimizations (LTO) for all 64-bit package builds...

For those Linux gamers and other desktop users of the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with some extra time this weekend, Mesa 21.0-RC3 is now available for testing as what might be the last release candidate before officially releasing Mesa 21.0 as soon as next week...

Following NVIDIA RTX 30 open-source mode-setting support in Linux 5.11, the batch of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.12 kernel have now been submitted to DRM-Next...

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 released near the beginning of the month with various "RDNA 2" optimizations while now AMDVLK 2021.Q1.2 is out in closing out the month and bringing more Big Navi optimizations...

Plans are moving forward for providing standalone XWayland packages that would ship the latest XWayland code for allowing X11 clients within Wayland environments, separate from X.Org Server releases as has been the bundling case to date...

Following last week's release of Google Chrome 88, the Chrome 89 beta is now available for testing...

For those looking at setting up a water-cooled rackmount server either for running high-end hardware like the new AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO hardware or just wanting a minimal noise environment for your studio or other environment, the SilverStone RM42-502 is a 4U rackmount chassis that can handle SSI-EEB motherboards and still provide enough room for supporting up to 240mm liquid cooling radiators. We've been testing out the SilverStone RM42-502 to great success for the past month in conjunction with the SilverStone IceGem 240P AIO water cooling setup.

Intel's open-source driver developers have begun posting patches for bringing up "Display13" as their next-gen display IP that looks like it will be introduced after the upcoming Rocket Lake / Alder Lake / DG1 platforms...

Just last week I wrote about Itanium IA-64 support in Linux kernel being broken for a month during the Linux 5.11 kernel cycle. That was fixed but since then another regression came to light that had been affecting all IA-64 hardware since a patch was merged back in October. A fix for that latest regression has landed while in the process now marking the Itanium architecture as orphaned...

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...