Phoronix

Valve has released their updated Steam Survey figures for February 2021...

Last summer the GRUB bootloader was impacted by "BootHole" with security issues hitting its UEFI Secure Boot support while today a new round of vulnerabilities were made public...

Last summer the GRUB bootloader was impacted by "BootHole" with security issues hitting its UEFI Secure Boot support while today a new round of vulnerabilities were made public...

Last week I issued a warning of possible data loss on the early Linux 5.12 kernel code that was reliably leaving my test systems severely corrupted. Intel's internal graphics test systems it turns out have now been bitten by this issue in encountering this significant file-system corruption and as such they've been quick to jump on the issue - there's now an idea what's causing the nasty issue and a workaround by reverting select patches...

Last week I issued a warning of possible data loss on the early Linux 5.12 kernel code that was reliably leaving my test systems severely corrupted. Intel's internal graphics test systems it turns out have now been bitten by this issue in encountering this significant file-system corruption and as such they've been quick to jump on the issue - there's now an idea what's causing the nasty issue and a workaround by reverting select patches...

Chrome 89 is out today as the latest stable version of Google's web browser. With Chrome 89 various new APis are deemed stable including WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial...

Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.

Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.

The first beta is out today of the forthcoming Qt 6.1 toolkit...

It's been talked about many times from various parties but so far has remained elusive from the mainline LLVM code-base: a SPIR-V back-end for LLVM that would go from LLVM into this Khronos intermediate representation most notably used by OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. Intel engineers are stepping up and hope to help get a proper SPIR-V back-end upstreamed into LLVM...

GCC compiler patches began appearing this morning for IBM Z "Arch14" as a future architecture extension for their Z mainframe processors. IBM Z Arch14 will likely correlate to IBM z16...

While Linux 5.12 has many great new features, what you won't find in the mainline kernel is the new "NTFS3" kernel driver developed by Paragon Software for NTFS file-systems. That driver is still coming for a future kernel and has now been sent out a twenty-second time for review...

The latest "Smart Access Memory" work by the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver stack is an option for the RADV Vulkan driver to force the "SAM" behavior even if the system is not advertising all the video RAM as visible or even if using APU graphics...

While SDL2-enabled games/applications can already work on PipeWire-based systems like the forthcoming Fedora Workstation 34 thanks to the PulseAudio compatibility layer, the SDL2 library has merged initial support for interfacing with PipeWire...

Of the performance-related changes with Linux 5.12 worth noting is faster AES-NI XTS performance for systems relying upon return trampolines "Retpolines" as part of the CPU's Spectre V2 mitigations. On the Intel side this primarily impacts older CPUs where Retpolines is still used while on the AMD side through Zen 3 the Retpolines is still relied upon, which as shown by these benchmarks is now much better off for AMD Ryzen AES XTS performance as measured by Cryptsetup...

The Linux kernel source tree following the eventful 5.12 merge window is at 28.81 million lines in the source tree across more than sixty thousand files. The largest in-tree kernel driver continues to be the AMDGPU kernel driver, which in the next kernel release or so should be crossing three million lines...

Building off the recent DXVK 1.8 release is a new point release with more performance optimizations, game fixes, and related work to this Direct3D-on-Vulkan translation layer that is extremely popular with Linux gamers...

The Radeon ROCm open-source compute documentation has been updated to more clearly spell out what was already implied: their focus is on compute for headless, GUI-less workloads and not OpenCL or compute for conventional desktop applications...

From FreeBSD 13 nearing release and helloSystem making waves to Linux 5.11 getting buttoned up while paired with the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference was able to capture much interest in the open-source community during another pandemic month...

Vulkan 1.2.171 is out this morning with several fixes and clarifications to this high performance graphics / compute API specification while there is also a new extension for allowing BlackBerry QNX support...