For those wondering how say AVX heavy a particular program is being benchmarked or if a given program/benchmark supports making use of new instruction set extensions such as Vector AES or forthcoming AVX VNNI or AMX, the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org can now provide that insight on a per-test basis with common CPU instruction set extensions.

Following the re-architected OpenBenchmarking.org roll-out from last year , new and exciting features continue to be enabled especially for its analytics engine and providing more insight around test profile

Taiwins debuted last year as a compact Wayland compositor and focused on being modular with Wayland scripting support . Up to now Taiwins relied upon the WLROOTS effort born out of the Sway project for doing much of the Wayland heavy-lifting but the developer has now replaced it with its own Wayland support library.

Taiwins 0.2.9 has been released as this latest version. While WLROOTS was used on the back-end previously, now there is "libtaiwins" as its own library as an alternative to WLROOTS or Weston'

Immediately following the CXL 2.0 specification being made public in November, Intel developers began posting Linux enablement patches for CXL 2.0 with an initial focus on type-3 memory device support . It's looking like that CXL 2.0 enablement work is now closer to being mainlined in the Linux kernel.

The initial discussion and review of those CXL 2.0 / type-3 memory device support patches were sent out under a "request for comments" (RFC) flag as is common for early stage

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák continues squeezing Mesa for every bit of possible performance, which in recent months has been with a seemingly workstation focus.

In recent weeks we have covered big performance improvements for SPECviewperf with the Mesa/Gallium3D code. SPECviewperf is around modeling graphics performance for professional applications like CATIA, 3ds Max, Maya, Solidworks, Siemens NX, and more.

Just a few days ago more improvements landed in Mesa benefiting SPECviewperf. While this weekend was the latest

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.1 as the first development snapshot of the new series, Wine-Staging is out this morning with an updated release.

Wine-Staging 6.1 is out with nearly 800 patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base. There are some 780 patches even after a number of patches were upstreamed into Wine recently.

Among the new changes to find with Wine-Staging 6.1 include:

- A fix for the game Path of Exile

While it's sign-up time for open-source organizations hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2021 changes in the name of the pandemic are leading some organizations to debate whether it's still being involved with this student coding effort.

One of the main frustrations from organizations with GSoC 2021 is that there are lowered time expectations for participating students, so in turn less large projects/work can be tackled. The pay is also lowered with the

Bareflank is an open-source Linux hypervisor in development for several years and written around modern C++11/C++14 code and other modern functionality compared to longstanding virtualization hypervisors. Over the past few years it's been picking up many new features while this week Bareflank 2.1 released prior to a major overhaul coming with Bareflank 3.0 that will radically change the codebase.

Bareflank 3.0 has been in the works for more than one year and among the big ticket items are

Last year the Linux kernel began tightening up the ability to write to select CPU MSRs from user-space . That restricting of user-space access to select registers was done in the name of security as well as not wanting user-space to accidentally or maliciously poke some MSRs that could cause problems with kernel behavior. Now in kernel space there are some yet-to-be-merged patches that would place some new restrictions on kernel modules around poking certain registers or using select CPU instructions.

Originally written last April and

While the AMD Linux graphics driver for some time has been supporting FreeSync over DisplayPort connections, FreeSync displays connected via HDMI have not been supported. But now we are finally seeing the start of patches at least as far as HDMI pre-v2.1 support is concerned.

HDMI 2.1 has Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) as part of the standard for reducing lag, stuttering, and frame tearing particularly while gaming. While HDMI 2.1 has the standardized VRR and many other features, HDMI Forum limiting specification