Phoronix

One of many improvements we have been looking forward to with GNOME 40 is Mutter now having a separate input thread with its native back-end for Wayland...

In addition to shipping the Plasma 5.21 beta this week, KDE developers were very active in not only working out fixes for next month's Plasma 5.21 desktop but also other improvements to KDE applications...

Adding to the list of big ticket changes for GNOME 40 is Mutter now supporting atomic mode-setting...

Pyston started out as a fork of CPython and was very promising during its early days as a Dropbox project for delivering on high performance Python. Its performance was great but in 2017 Dropbox stopped supporting it. Then at the end of 2020, Pyston reappeared and Pyston 2.0 promoted ~20% faster performance than Python 3.8. Pyston 2.x was developed by many of the original developers from Dropbox now out working on their own firm...

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa on a nice upward trajectory with most recently now having the backing of a Valve contract developer and a focus on getting the backlog of patches to this Gallium3D code upstreamed, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at where the performance currently stands when using Zink atop the RADV Vulkan driver compared to using the native RadeonSI driver with this round of testing from a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle...

It's taken nearly twenty five years but the mainline Linux kernel this year will be able to boot on the Nintendo 64 game console... It's looking like the Nintendo 64 support will be merged with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel...

New feature material for Linux 5.12 continues getting ready ahead of the merge window opening in February to formally kick off the cycle...

In addition to Oracle's GraalVM 21.0 being released this week, the Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 v0.24 as the newest feature release for their high performance JVM...

Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser...

The Apache Software Foundation announced on Thursday that Apache Superset reached "top-level" status...

The oneAPI Level Zero repository consisting of the Level Zero API headers, Level Zero loader, and validation layer have reached version 1.1...

It was just earlier this month that mainline Mesa achieved OpenGL 4.1 for Zink, the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to be implemented atop Vulkan. Now OpenGL 4.2 support is in place for this promising Mesa component...

Not only is the AMD "CPU frequency invariance regression" from that new support with the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel on course to address the performance shortcomings I outlined last month, but with the patched kernel for a number of workloads the performance is now ahead of where it was at with Linux 5.10.

KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year...

Red Hat hasn't been the only major enterprise Linux distribution shifting around their pieces with regards to how RHEL is formed with moving to CentOS Stream as its future upstream. Over the past year especially openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise having been moving closer together with the source trees now being more closely aligned between Leap and "SLE". SUSE has published an insightful blog post series detailing the prior way that openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap tied in with SUSE Linux Enterprise and then the direction they have been shifting...

Netgate has announced pfSense as a rebranded and improved edition of this popular BSD-based firewall/network OS platform...

Even in 2021 longtime open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák isn't done optimizing OpenGL for delivering the best possible performance with the Radeon graphics driver. Marek's latest work includes more OpenGL threading enhancements and other work seemingly targeted at SPECViewPerf workloads...

While Ubuntu normally ships with the latest GNOME desktop as of release time, April's release of Ubuntu 21.04 will not be shipping with GNOME 40 but sticking to GNOME 3.38...

Raptor Engineering known for their work on open-source POWER9 systems has announced Kestrel, an open-source baseboard management controller (BMC) design that is open down to the HDL design and firmware...