Phoronix

With yesterday's release of Blender 3.3 much of the excitement has been about the new Intel oneAPI back-end for Arc Graphics acceleration and also improvements to AMD's HIP back-end for supporting GPUs back to Vega. However, even if you are using CPU-based rendering, Blender 3.3 LTS is looking like a nice upgrade for better performance...

AMD's GPUOpen group has released an updated version of FidelityFX Super Resolution 2. The new FSR 2.1 brings quality enhancements and a reduction in artifacts as the primary benefits over the original FSR2 that was unvelied earlier this year and open-sourced during the summer...

With the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D as the first consumer processor with AMD 3D V-Cache technology that launched earlier this year, the Linux performance has been fantastic for a variety of workloads especially in areas of technical computing and other non-gaming workloads -- similar to the great results we've enjoyed with AMD EPYC Milan-X processors too. One of the areas I hadn't had a chance to look at until recently was how the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance is looking for this Ryzen CPU with its 96MB L3 cache. Here are those quick benchmarks.

Distrobox is the open-source software that quickly and easily fires up Linux distributions in containers for helping to augment the package selection from your host distribution, easily experiment with different distributions, and other use-cases. Distrobox 1.4 is out this week with the latest enhancements for this project...

Last week saw the debut of Vulkan 1.3.226 with mesh shader support introduced as a new cross-vendor extension while out this morning is Vulkan 1.3.227 with a new extension for helping the layering of OpenGL atop Vulkan...

One day shy of a year since Qt 5.15.6 LTS Commercial was released, The Qt Company has now published that point release as open-source...

With Fedora 37 approaching release at the end of October, more feature changes for Fedora 38 next spring are continuing to be discussed. One of the interesting proposals this week is enabling acceleration of GnuTLS using the kernel TLS (kTLS)...

While LLVM 15.0 was just released this week with many new compiler features, a big change just merged for next spring's LLVM/Clang 16.0 release: C++17 with GNU extensions is now the default C++ and ObjectiveC++ version...

Ahead of the upcoming Godot 4.0 Beta, this impressive open-source game engine has been tacking on a few more improvements in another Godot 4.0 alpha build...

Due to bringing a number of new SoC designs to market next year and trying to make their model numbers easier to decipher, AMD announced this morning a new naming system for Ryzen mobile processors...

Blender 3.3 is out this morning as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced a new release of their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) as their reference Linux distribution for running on these low-cost Arm single-board computers...

The latest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver work for Mesa 22.3's RADV is enabling 3D sparse image support...

Blender 3.3 is set to be released today and one of the exciting enhancements with this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software update is initial support for Intel oneAPI/SYCL GPU acceleration. Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs can now enjoy this accelerated Cycles back-end, permitting your driver stack is new enough on Windows or Linux and are using their new dGPUs and not existing integrated graphics. But this is just the start of their oneAPI GPU-accelerated push for Blender...

Since Apple introduced the M1 two years ago as their in-house Apple Silicon for laptops and desktops with a powerful AArch64 processor and custom-designed graphics processor, there has been much speculation about whether the Apple M1 (and now M2) graphics are a clean-sheet Apple design or derived from Imagination PowerVR graphics that Apple had been using with earlier SoCs. There has been some similarities brought up before with the Asahi Linux team working on enabling the Apple M1/M2 under Linux while the latest Mesa driver activity points to more common bits between PowerVR graphics hardware and the Apple AGX graphics...

Formed back in 2019 by Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat was the Bytecode Alliance to promote running WebAssembly (WASM) everywhere. As part of the Bytecode Alliance initiatives they have been developing Wasmtime as a WebAssembly run-time and later this month they plan to christen version 1.0...

Following a slight release delay, yesterday saw the release of NetBeans 15 by the Apache Software Foundation as this Java-focused integrated deevelopment environment that also supports C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, and other languages...

While Intel Arc Graphics is already running on the open-source Linux driver stack, Intel engineers continue improving upon and refining that DG2/Alchemist graphics card support. Overnight some fresh workarounds were merged into Mesa 22.3-devel as the latest Linux driver improvements for Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics cards...

Back in July I called attention to the issue how Linux 5.19 was set to break Alder Lake P graphics support unless moving to new graphics micro-controller "GuC" firmware in tandem. That user-space breakage is frowned upon and following that article the upstream DRM kernel maintainers outlined explicit requirements around firmware not breaking driver support. Intel engineers ended up submitting a quick fix for Linux 5.19 to still support the existing firmware while now a more adequate solution has been devised...

With Fedora 39 next spring it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux...

Following the July disclosure of the Retbleed CPU security vulnerability affecting older processors and an AMD change made in August, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Retbleed mitigations on Linux, including if opting for the IBPB-based Retbleed mitigation, and the accumulated CPU security mitigation impact for Zen 2 with the flagship Ryzen 9 3950X processor.

GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual...

LLVM 15 is now ready to roll as a big half-year update to this open-source compiler stack. LLVM 15.0, Clang 15.0, and other sub-projects have a lot to show for their summer 2022 accomplishments...

DRM-Misc manager Maarten Lankhorst with Intel's open-source graphics engineering team has submitted the latest weekly pull of new feature code to queue in DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.1 merge window...

Last month saw the Cemu project go open-source and introduce Linux support with Cemu 2.0 for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that has been in development for years. Cemu 2.0-1 is now available with Linux improvements...

OpenWrt as the embedded Linux distribution designed to run on wireless routers and other networking devices is out with its 22.03 stable release...

Mesa recently landed BPTC software fallback handling that is a requirement for OpenGL 4.2 support but BPTC is not natively supported by all GPU hardware, particularly on the embedded side. That software emulation support for BPTC is similar to what already has existed within Mesa for the ASTC and ETC formats too. A merge request is pending that also adds S3TC software fallback handling, which helps out some of the smaller, embedded GPU drivers too for getting more games running that are dependent on S3 Texture Compression...

After a series of alpha and beta releases over the past several months, out this past week is the first release candidate of the upcoming PHP 8.2...

Being merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.3 is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently ratified mesh shader extension...

While there has been talk and plans for Vulkan API support within Blender, currently there are no active developers working on it and much work remains before it would be ready for end-users...

A new patch floated by a Google Chrome OS / Linux kernel engineer would enable support for the Intel-led Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) by default as part of the standard kernel configuration for this security feature...

Originally carried as a patch against Ubuntu 22.04 for its GNOME 42 desktop and continued to be maintained against GNOME 43 for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 is supporting dynamic triple buffering with the Mutter compositor. This has allowed Ubuntu's GNOME desktop environment to perform better for some systems albeit not upstream in GNOME...

Following the OpenMandriva Lx ROME Technical Preview release from earlier this summer, a "silver candidate" for OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 ROME is now available for testing...

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.0 in time for some US Labor Day holiday weekend testing...

A change queued up as part of the "x86/mm" TIP changes expected to land for Linux 6.1 will now have the default kernel configuration warn at kernel boot time around any W+X mappings that pose a security risk...

The release candidates are out today for the GNOME Shell and Mutter updates ahead of this month's GNOME 43 desktop debut...

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for compatibility with GPUOpen's Radeon Raytracing Analyzer...

KDE's Kaidan app has been in development for a number of years now as a Jabber/XMPP chat client built around Kirigami and Qt Quick. Kaidan has been under active development and formally became a KDE project in 2019. It's newest ambition is now working out encrypted audio and video calls...

GravityMark 1.70 has been released as the multi-API graphics benchmark developed by Tellusim Technologies that was started by former Unigine engine CTO and co-founder Alexander Zapryagaev...

Currently when it comes to shipping new/updated device support for firmware updating under Linux with FWUPD/LVFS, it requires making/adjusting a Fwupd plug-in for carrying out the actual firmware copying/updating of the device and then adding in the device VID/PID to a quirks table so Fwupd knows about what to match a given device to for the firmware plug-in to use. Even in new devices where no plug-in changes are required, new device entries are still needed in the quirks table and it makes it challenging when Linux distributions don't quickly move to new FWUPD releases. Moving forward a better solution is being explored...

There is a lot of last minute feature work and improvements heading into Plasma 5.26 ahead of its upcoming beta and feature freeze...

While it's been years since Canonical dropped Unity as the official desktop environment of Ubuntu, some within the open-source community have still been maintaining it and running an unofficial Ubuntu Unity flavor of the distribution. Now with next month's Ubuntu 22.10 release, Ubuntu Unity will be an official flavor/spin...

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel...

PipeWire 0.3.57 was released on Friday as the newest update to this Linux audio/video streams management solution that aims to fill the functionality currently provided by the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

The sdl12-compat is a SDL 1.2 compatibility layer implementation atop SDL 2.0. This sdl12-compat project allows for old, out-of-date games and other applications relying on the old SDL 1.2 interface to in turn run via the modern SDL2 library for better compatibility with input devices, Wayland support (assuming no direct X11 hard dependencies), support for PipeWire audio, improved input controls, and various other enhancements only found in SDL 2.0 and not the unmaintained SDL 1.2...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems has added support for the newly-ratified Vulkan mesh shader extension...

Back in July Intel's Peter Zijlstra proposed "Call Depth Tracking" as a mitigation approach for handling Retbleed and avoiding the "performance horror show" of Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) usage. Out today is the newest version of the Call Depth Tracking code and the performance benchmark results are looking very promising for lessening the pain of the Retbleed CPU mitigation performance impact...

The recently proposed Intel open-source Vulkan driver split where the Gen7/Gen8 graphics support would be shifted off to a separate "new" legacy driver has happened to allow the Intel ANV Vulkan driver to move forward with its Skylake "Gen9" graphics and later focus...

As expected, Ubuntu 22.10 will be powered by the Linux 5.19 kernel...

As part of experimenting with using Rust code inside Mesa, longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat has been developing Rusticl as a new Rust-based OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D and an alternative to the long-standing "Clover" OpenCL state tracker. That Rusticl code with the initial Rust infrastructure for Mesa is expected to be merged in the coming days...