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After a quiet holiday period the Linux 5.16 kernel is set to be introduced as stable this Sunday. Here is a look at the sixteen most exciting features to find with Linux 5.16...

As part of the various end-of-year Linux comparisons that I've made a habit of over the past 17 years, with the EOY 2021 benchmarking I was rather curious to see how Intel's Clear Linux distribution has evolved Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" performance since that platform launched in Q2'2021. It turns out there have been some terrific optimizations squeezed out of that latest-generation Xeon Scalable platform on Intel's Clear Linux. In this article is a look at the Ubuntu and Clear Linux performance on the flagship Xeon Platinum 8380 2P reference server back around the time Ice Lake launched and then again using the latest software packages that closed out 2021.

For those assigning VFIO devices to guest virtual machines, the initialization/start-up process may soon be much faster with a set of patches volleyed by Oracle...

In preparation for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors, Linux 5.16 adds support for Advanced Matrix Extensions. But that AMX bring-up is more invasive than when introducing AVX as with AMX the feature needs to be "requested" for use by user-space, among other changes. As such extra handling also needed to be introduced for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that hadn't made it for v5.16 but now it looks like the AMX KVM support may be ready for mainline...

Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs...

It looks like EXT4 with Linux 5.17 will finally be supporting the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls that several other prominent file-systems have been supporting the past few years...

Recently there have been reports of some AMD Ryzen powered notebooks being unable to correctly suspend from resume in s2idle mode. It appears the issue ultimately stems from a firmware setting issue and a set of Linux patches were sent out today to address the condition...

Mutter landed a prominent addition today for GNOME 42: the Wayland compositor now supports the recently introduced DMA-BUF feedback extension...

After the many years now that AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been seeing relentless optimizations for GCN and now RDNA GPUs paired with the fact more Linux games targeting Vulkan (or going through Direct3D to Vulkan), one might think in 2022 that the OpenGL driver optimization efforts would let up... But that doesn't appear to be the case with well known AMD RadeonSI developer Marek Olšák pursuing yet more optimizations...

2022 will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on desktop Linux distributions for managing both audio/video streams. New PipeWire releases come quick in working to address remaining gaps in this Red Hat led solution and ensuring it can fulfill the use-cases previously handled by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK...

The AMD P-State driver that has been available in patch form since September and stems from AMD's collaborations with Valve around the Steam Deck will be introduced to mainline with the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel...

NVIDIA Reflex is an SDK for game developers for measuring and reducing rendering latency. But now there is an alternative, open-source implementation of those APIs that can work across drivers/vendors while still helping to reduce rendering latency: meet LatencyFleX...

Merged into the mainline Linux kernel a decade ago was the CleanCache patch series but now it's set to be retired...

The RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers within Mesa 22.0 have now added an override for controlling the number of enabled compute units (CUs) for the graphics processor...

Last year Google quietly open-sourced the Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) for sorting out GPU hangs and crashes. GFR is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that works on both Windows and Linux...

After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game...

Google this afternoon promoted the Chrome 97 web browser to its stable series...

While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance...

Intel is using CES 2022 to announce the 12th Gen Intel Core mobile processors led by the H-series processors, new 35-Watt and 65-Watt 12th Gen Core desktop CPUs, an updated Intel Evo specification, and an update on their DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics efforts.

As expected, NVIDIA has used its CES 2022 address to announce the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti albeit in brief form. The GeForce RTX 3050 was also announced...