Phoronix

Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for Linux 5.13 have been submitted in providing the latest features for this flash-optimized file-system...

Introduced last year was Taiwins as a compact Wayland compositor. While early on it began using Sway's WLROOTS library, it ended up writing its own Wayland compositor library (libtaiwins) and recently hit its version 0.3 milestone...

For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment...

Merged as part of the block subsystem changes for the Linux 5.13 were the usual assortment of enhancements to the exciting IO_uring. With this next kernel there is yet even better performance out of this morning Linux I/O interface...

Adding to the variety of places where the Linux kernel supports making use of Zstd compression, kernel modules moving forward can now enjoy size reductions with Zstd...

Released on Friday was a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland...

While Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and their Azure cloud has largely been x86_64 focused, with the Linux 5.13 kernel they are moving further for supporting Linux as a ARM64 Hyper-V guest...

While last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" improvements managed to make it for GCC 11 that was recently released, the recent debut of LLVM 12.0 wasn't so lucky on the Zen 3 support front. There was the very basic enablement that landed in LLVM 12 but now the more complete support isn't expected until LLVM 13 this autumn...

Those moving to Mesa 21.x releases for the latest open-source GPU driver support on Linux are seemingly finding their Valve "Trust Factor" matchmaking system scores dropping for Counter-Strike: GO, leading to numerous upset Linux gamers with AMD Radeon GPUs...

Last week the big set of networking subsystem updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 merge window...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has finally merged support for the KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension...

Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux...

The OrangeFS open-source parallel file-system designed for cluster computing has a huge performance improvement to its read speeds with Linux 5.13...

Since the publishing of the provisional Vulkan Video specification last month, the only driver on Linux to have exposed any early Vulkan Video support is NVIDIA's Vulkan beta Linux driver. But it would appear that Intel's open-source developers are working at least towards eventually handling this video acceleration API...

As part of recent and upcoming new CPU benchmarks on Phoronix and other Linux hardware review testing, April saw more new and updated test profiles for expanding more workloads tested...

While PipeWire continues garnering interest this year for improving Linux sound in user-space, the kernel's sound drivers continue to be improved upon as well and tacking on support for new devices...

Going back about a half-decade has been the Landlock Linux Security Module (LSM) as a means of allowing even unprivileged processes to create "powerful security" sandboxes. After a number of rounds of reviews and revisions over the year, Landlock has finally been mainlined for Linux 5.13!..

For those curious about the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare always as we begin a new month, Valve published their April 2021 figures overnight...

Open-source "Nouveau" driver developers have been working on at least partial support for OpenGL compute within the NV50 Gallium3D driver that is used by the NVIDIA GeForce 8 series through GeForce 300 series graphics cards...