Phoronix

Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved...

It's fairly common that many longtime Linux kernel developers use their personal email addresses for signing off on kernel patches or dealing with other patch work, especially when they are engaging with kernel development in their personal time too and occasionally jumping between employers over time while still sticking to interacting with the upstream kernel community, etc. There are also understandably some companies that mandate the use of their corporate email addresses for their official work/patches while now IBM seems to be taking things one step to the extreme...

It's been over one year already since the debut of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while fortunately DragonFlyBSD 6.0 will be here soon for this popular BSD operating system...

Microsoft is preparing the Linux kernel for some yet-to-debut Azure network functionality...

Of the many new features coming with Linux 5.12 is KFence, short for the Kernel Electric Fence. KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator for the kernel with lower expected overhead costs than say the Kernel Address Sanitizer. I just wrapped up some benchmarks looking out for any overhead impact of KFence on Linux 5.12 in its near-final state...

Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs...

Firefox 88.0 is out today as the latest version of Mozilla's web browser...

One of the exciting elements of last month's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch was having same-day availability in public clouds. Microsoft as one of AMD's cloud partners worked closely to deliver launch-day availability in their public cloud using EPYC 7003 series processors with the new "HBv3" instances focused on high performance computing (HPC) virtual machines. Here are some benchmarks of the Azure HPv3 instances compared to prior generation Microsoft Azure HPC instances available on-demand in their cloud.

The first release candidate is up for version 1.7 of the Portable Computing Language, the portable OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs and other accelerators. With POCL 1.7, OpenCL 3.0 is now being exposed and there is also improved support for SPIR-V binaries on CPUs...

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.2.175 that introduced the Vulkan Video extensions while out this morning is now the Vulkan 1.2.176 revision...

Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks...

Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source drivr for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal...

While normally after seven weekly release candidates the next stable Linux kernel release is declared, Linux 5.12 is one of those special kernels needing at least an eighth RC before going gold...

While Arch Linux now has its own convenient installer for quick and easy Arch installs, for those in search of an out-of-the-box, desktop-friendly Arch based Linux distribution Endeavour OS remains one of the leading options in 2021. This weekend marks the availability of Endeavour's April 2021 install media refresh...

Jonathan Carter who was initially elected as Debian Project Leader last year to succeed Sam Hartman has now been re-elected for another year serving in this role...

Released last week was the LuxCoreRender 2.5 open-source physically based renderer. Significant with this v2.5 update is OptiX/RTX acceleration support in addition to its existing CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU render paths. Given that, here are some fresh benchmarks of LuxCoreRender 2.5 across an assortment of NVIDIA graphics cards.

If all goes well Linux 5.12 will be released tomorrow and in turn will kick off the Linux 5.13 merge window (otherwise 5.12-rc8 will be issued and the stable then a week later). In any case once the Linux 5.13 merge window does open there are a lot of prominent changes expected...

Realtek has contributed support for the RTL8153 and RTL8156 Ethernet chipsets to their "r8152" USB network driver for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle...

Hitting the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch on Friday was the long in development WWAN subsystem/framework...

It's been another busy spring week in KDE land...