Phoronix

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend...

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September...

While the AMDGPU back-end has been part of mainline LLVM for years, not until now has it supported an OpenMP toolchain for offloading to Radeon GPUs...

The GNU Network Utilities (inetutils) has seen its first major release in nine years or even the first release at all in six years since the prior point release. With GNU inetutils 2.0 are several updates to common programs like ping and ifconfig...

In addition to this week seeing Zink now running on NVIDIA's proprietary driver for supporting this Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan implementation, it can now run on top of Lavapipe as the CPU-based Vulkan implementation. But for end-users that is really something you would want to avoid...

For those following the saga of the AMD frequency invariance regression on Linux 5.11 since the Christmas investigative benchmarking looking at the performance regressions, everything now looks like it will be buttoned up in time for the Linux 5.11 stable release. As noted yesterday, there was a curve ball this week in that the patch proposed by SUSE's Giovanni Gherdovich in January to address the frequency invariance regression was turned down by the Linux power management maintainer and instead he (Rafael Wysocki of Intel) proposed an alternative patch that instead modified the CPUFreq driver. Given it's getting late into the cycle, it's been a mad rush of re-conducting benchmarks on this new kernel patch and now it looks like that solution will be sent in the coming days for Linux 5.11.

The plan for Fedora 34 to improve font rendering by enabling HarfBuzz in FreeType was approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee...

Intel sent out a news release on Thursday proclaiming their new 11th Gen H35 "Tiger Lake H" processors deliver the "fastest single-threaded laptop performance" thanks to the Core i7 11375H delivering up to 5GHz turbo frequencies...

Stemming from the attention shined on the matter of uncertainty how long the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel will be maintained due to a current lack of committed support, stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman penned a new blog post outlining the (easy) process of testing new kernel release candidates and simply reporting the feedback...

The Linux kernel's floppy driver dates back to the original days of the kernel back in 1991 and is still being maintained thirty years later with the occasional fix...

A new developer feature coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel thanks to a Canonical developer is software audio jack injection support...

The second point release to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is now officially released. Notable with Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS is the new hardware enablement (HWE) stack that brings the Linux kernel, Mesa, and related components from Ubuntu 20.10, which means better hardware support that tends to be most notable around better open-source graphics support...

Security firm Corellium has been working on enabling the Apple M1 SoC under Linux and last month they posted initial Linux kernel patches for the Apple M1. Meanwhile independent developer Hector Martin has also been working on Apple M1 enablement via crowdfunding and today he posted his initial set of Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple 2020 hardware under Linux...

The AMD "frequency invariance" saga with Linux 5.11 continues... While there was a patch to address the previously noted performance regression caused by the introduction of frequency invariance and seen when using the Schedutil governor, a new CPUFreq-side patch series has been proposed instead -- both of which are addressing the performance issue with this new kernel for AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 systems...

With Mesa 21.0 releasing soon here is a look at the new features for this quarter's release of these open-source Vulkan / OpenGL driver implementations.

Sent in today to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle were "fixes" but some interesting items worth noting in this batch...

The open-source Broadcom graphics driver code most notably used by Raspberry Pi devices will be seeing at least slightly better performance come next quarter's Mesa 21.1 release...

In addition to VKD3D-Proton working on support for DXR ray-tracing another high profile Direct3D 12 feature being implemented on top of Vulkan is support for variable rate shading...

For those wondering where Ubuntu's Mir is being used in current form with their continued development of it these days as a Wayland compositor, it turns out it is being used within smart exercise mirrors as at least one implementation...

Following in the footsteps of Apache Superset and Apache ECharts, DataSketches has been promoted to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation...