Phoronix

It's already been six years since the initial pre-alpha release of Devuan, the fork of Debian that aims to provide Debian without systemd and focus on init system independence. For marking the Valentine's Day occasion, developers released Devuan 3.1...

Earlier this month Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux developers posted their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple M1 ARM SoC platform for the mainline kernel with devices like the 2020 Mac Mini / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air devices. The second iteration of those Apple M1 Linux patches have now been posted...

Heading out of Valentine's weekend, there is a new Vulkan specification update with a notable new extension...

Due to an unfortunate misalignment of the Ryzen 5000 series launch and the Linux kernel cycles, CPU temperature monitoring for Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) desktop CPUs isn't landing until now with the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle...

The Dark Mod that began as a total conversion mod for Doom 3 but evolved into a standalone game making use of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine is out with a big update. This is one of the few open-source games making use of the public id Tech 4 code-base and with today's v2.09 update is a large rewrite to its graphics back-end...

Made public last year was the Arm Straight Light Speculation (SLS) vulnerability. SLS with ARM hardware can result in speculative executing instructions following an unconditional change in control flow. The Linux kernel may soon have an option for enabling the mitigation of the Arm SLS vulnerability...

What better way for open-source enthusiasts to celebrate Valentine's Day than with the stable release of the Linux 5.11 kernel... Linus Torvalds even changed the kernel codename for the occasion to being the "Valentine's Day Edition" kernel...

Among Facebook employees while they are mostly using Windows and macOS on their laptops/desktops, for those using Linux the primary choice has shifted from Ubuntu to Fedora but they have begun ramping up CentOS Stream too...

The open-source Linux graphics driver support for the Ryzen 5000 series mobile hardware has been developed under the "Green Sardine" codename. With the soon-to-be-stable Linux 5.11 kernel offering the initial enablement for the new hardware and Ryzen 5000 series laptops expected this quarter, the Green Sardine firmware blobs have landed in linux-firmware.git...

Linux 5.11 should be released today as stable but we'll see if 5.11-rc8 is decided instead given there has been an uptick in last minute changes for this kernel. This will mean either the Linux 5.12 merge window is kicking off at the end of today or could be pushed back by one week, but in whatever case there are many changes that have been queuing up for this next kernel version window...

It's been eighteen years since the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was released while thanks to the it becoming open-source along with the id Tech 3 engine, it's still being advanced by the open-source community in 2021...

Going back to last year there has been work by AMD engineers on an experimental FreeSync video mode optimization to avoid screen blanking around full-screen video playback. Basically avoiding an entire mode-set when changing the timing mode during video playback to bypass any screen flickering/blanking. That work has now been updated to its sixth spin while it's being viewed as a temporary measure until a better solution can be devised...

Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor that is the Rust-based virtualization hypervisor focused for cloud environments is out with its newest open-source release...

There has been a lot of attention on helloSystem this week as a macOS-inspired operating system built atop FreeBSD with an emphasis on providing a polished desktop experience. Since we highlighting the FOSDEM presentation about it, there has been a lot of coverage on helloSystem and this weekend marks a new experimental ISO release...

IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent times. IO_uring for more efficient asynchronous I/O has continued getting faster and introducing new features over the past two years and for the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle will be even faster...

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is now under its soft freeze, one month after starting its build-essentials freeze...

Following last weekend's release of FreeBSD 13 BETA1, the second beta is now available for testing this big BSD operating system update...

Ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window expected to open at end of day tomorrow, assuming Linux 5.11 is out on schedule, there is already a pending pull request with a big feature addition: IDMAPPED mounts...

Two weeks ago with Wine-Staging 6.1 it was at nearly 800 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base while for Wine-Staging 6.2 it has fallen to just a 669 patch difference...

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development...