Phoronix

For as rough of a year as 2020 was, one of the many open-source accomplishments was Sony taking up "official" maintenance of their HID driver and ahead of Christmas to much surprise they published an official PlayStation 5 DualSense open-source controller driver for Linux. That PS5 controller driver is now set to be introduced with the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window...

Among Intel's many open-source software accomplishments for 2020 was introducing OSPray Studio as part of oneAPI. OSPray Studio builds atop the existing OSPray ray-tracing engine and inter-connected oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components to offer an open-source scene graph application for interactive visualizations and ray-tracing based rendering. The newest OSPray Studio is now available...

It was just yesterday we were talking about Zink achieving OpenGL 4.3 support and wondering if OpenGL 4.4 or potentially even 4.5 could be buttoned up in time for Mesa 21.1... Well, as of a few minutes ago Zink now is advertising OpenGL 4.5 support for this graphics API layer built atop Vulkan...

With this spring marking two years already since Intel introduced the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable "Cascade Lake" processors plus with Ice Lake Xeon processors being on the horizon, here is a look at how the flagship Xeon Platinum 8280 2P performance has evolved atop open-source Linux during that duration. The benchmarks today are looking at the performance of Ubuntu 19.04 for that of roughly the shape the Linux performance/optimizations were at launch and then the performance today if moving to the in-development Ubuntu 21.04 and also shifting to the latest Linux 5.11 kernel and GCC 11 code compiler.

It looks like thanks to AMD's increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is hiring more Linux engineers. AMD currently has several interesting job openings on the Linux front...

Mir, Canonical's Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes...

Back in September I wrote about Intel developers posting Linux enablement patches for their Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 PCIe accelerator for hardware-based load balancing functionality. That work hasn't yet been upstreamed but recently marked its tenth revision to the "DLB 2.0" patches...

Mesa's LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6...

The Mercurial distributed revision control system continues to see use particularly around some large code-base projects and the developers continue working to optimize its performance in part by transitioning more of it to the Rust programming language...

The USB4 / Thunderbolt changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window have been queued into the USB-next tree...

For months System76 has been teasing that they were getting into prototyping and manufacturing their own keyboards. This moves follows them manufacturing their own cases with the beautifully engineered Thelio line-up while now it looks like they are ready to go public with details on the System76 keyboard...

Just in time for the expected Linux 5.11 stable release on Sunday, the AMD frequency invariance performance regression I've been noting and writing about since Christmas day has been resolved with the previously covered fix having been merged today...

The official release of FreeBSD 13.0 is coming up in March, while already from our preliminary tests of the newly minted FreeBSD 13.0 BETA1, the benchmark results are extremely tantalizing compared to FreeBSD 12.2... Ultimately the performance should be much more competitive now compared to Linux (at least on Intel x86_64) and other operating systems with the big FreeBSD 13 release.

While GRUB 2.06 was aiming for release in 2020, having to deal with the BootHole security issue among other challenges last year ended up delaying that release. Fortunately, it looks like this long awaited GRUB feature update should be out this year and there has been increased cooperation between upstream GRUB developers and distribution vendors...

Announced nearly three years ago by Intel was the ACRN reference hypervisor framework intended for IoT/embedded use-cases with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing. More of the kernel bits to this "Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development" are set to see mainline with the imminent Linux 5.12 kernel cycle...

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly...

In addition to Linux 5.12 positioned to see Lenovo laptop "platform profile" support for controlling the power/thermal behavior of their newer ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops, this next kernel version also has other improvements on the IdeaPad front...

Linspire 10 is out this week as the newest version of this Linux distribution formerly known as Lindows nearly two decades ago. While Linspire went dark for several years, under its current ownership by PC/OpenSystems they have been trying to reinvigorate the desktop distribution the past few years. Linspire 10 represents the latest work for the Ubuntu-based platform...

Going back to last summer there have been patches for getting OpenGL 4.6 with the Zink GL on Vulkan implementation but were considered experimental and not for immediate upstreaming. In the months since and especially after Mike Blumenkrantz was hired by Valve, the upstreaming effort kicked into higher gear. Now with Mesa 21.1, we are up to OpenGL 4.3...

Going back about two years there has been work on properly supporting Wine on POWER 64-bit (PPC64). Now past the Wine 6.0 stable release, it looks like that work that work is finally beginning to land. In conjunction with Hangover to handle the cross-architecture aspect, the hope is to eventually allow Windows x86 programs to work on libre POWER systems or at the very least with native Winelib support to help in porting open-source Windows software to IBM POWER / OpenPOWER...