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Updated 2025-09-16 16:00
libvpx VP8/VP9 1.13 Released With Yet More AVX2 & Arm Neon Optimizations
Google engineers last week released libvpx 1.13 as the newest feature release to this library that serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 codecs. While Google engineers have already spent years tuning libvpx for maximum performance with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), the game is not over and v1.13 has yet more tuning there -- along with continued Arm Neon optimizations too...
Sway & wl-roots Land Support For Wayland Fractional Scaling
Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors...
Microsoft Officially Launches D3D12 GPU Video Acceleration For WSL Linux Use
For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users...
The Current State Of GCC 13's Rust Language Front-End
Arthur Cohen with Embecosm presented at the FOSDEM developer conference earlier this month on gccrs, the ongoing effort to provide a Rust language front-end to the GCC compiler. While the GCC Rust front-end has been merged for the upcoming GCC 13 release, it's not yet in a state that will really be usable to most Rust developers yet as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...
libdisplay-info Marks Its First Release To Reduce EDID/DisplayID Parsing Fragmentation
The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing...
Mesa's Rusticl Lands Support For SPIR-V Programs
It's been a while since there has been any major additions to Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL implementation led by Red Hat's Karol Herbst while today he merged support for SPIR-V programs to this Rust-written driver. This SPIR-V support is necessary for eventually supporting SYCL and HIP...
More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 - Closer To Having Rust Drivers Upstreamed
While initial Rust code was merged for Linux 6.1, it's not yet used by any kernel drivers or functionality for end-users and the integration and other abstractions for Rust are still being established. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle, more of that Rust groundwork is set to be merged and nearing the point of Rust-written kernel modules/drivers will be able to be upstreamed...
RISC-V Linux Patches Start On "zisslpcfi" Support For Control-Flow Integrity
While there is a lot to love about RISC-V, with the plethora of RISC-V extensions some of the acronyms are hard to digest. The latest example is the Linux kernel patches for "zisslpcfi", which is the RISC-V extension around Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for RISC-V processors...
Blender 4.0 Hopes To At Least Have A Non-Optimized Vulkan Implementation
The latest Blender Eevee and Viewport module meeting minutes have just been posted and outline the latest thinking around Vulkan API support from the perspective of these modules...
KiCad 7.0 Released For This Open-Source Electronics Design Automation Suite
KiCad 7.0 was released this weekend as a "significant upgrade" to this open-source EDA (Electronics Design Automation) suite that can be used for designing PCB layouts, circuit design schematics of varying complexity, and more...
Linux 6.2-rc8 Released - Stable Kernel Release Next Week
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc8 ahead of the planned Linux 6.2 stable release next Sunday, 19 February...
Microsoft ONNX Runtime 1.14 Released With A Big Intel AMX Performance Optimization
Microsoft on Friday released version 1.14 of their ONNX Runtime, a cross-platform, high performance machine learning inferencing and training accelerator...
X.Org Developers Conference 2023 Returning To Spain
Back in 2018 the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) was hosted in A Coruña, Spain by Igalia developers and for XDC2023 it's again returning...
GNOME's Mutter Lands Implicit Grabbing In Clutter To Enhance Gesture Handling
A ten month old merge request to GNOME's Mutter for adding implicit grabbing to the Clutter code was finally merged last week...
HarfBuzz 7.0 Text Shaping Engine Released
HarfBuzz 7.0 is out as a new version of this open-source text shaping library used by software like GNOME, KDE, Chrome OS, Java, Chrome, LibreOffice, and others...
Lutris 0.5.13 Beta Released With Proton Support, Itch.io Integration
Lutris 0.5.13 Beta is out this weekend as the newest test release for this open-source game manager that makes it easier to install and play video games from multiple game stores, emulators, and integration with other services...
Hangover Project Restarted To Run Windows 32-bit/64-bit Apps On ARM64/PPC64 & More
Several years ago the open-source "Hangover" project started as allowing Windows x86_64 and x86 programs to run on 64-bit ARM Linux by leveraging the upstream Wine software as well as QEMU. Hangover also saw work for allowing Windows programs to run on POWER9 Linux hardware and other architectures. The Hangover project has been on hiatus but is now back to being revived...
Open-Source Software Encode/Decode For H.266/VVC Progressing
The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder...
FFmpeg Is Ripe For More AVX-512 Optimizations
There is already some AVX-512 optimizations for software contained within the FFmpeg multimedia library, but there is room for greater AVX-512 usage especially now with AMD supporting this Advanced Vector Extensions expansion and the latest Intel Xeon CPUs having little associated cost now with AVX-512 use...
Audacious 4.3 Beta Adds PipeWire Plugin, Restores GTK3 + Ships Mature Qt6 Support
Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of the XMMS audio player from two decades ago. For those that enjoyed XMMS back in the day, Audacious continues being updated as a modern fork of XMMS...
KDE Plasma 5.27 Dubbed "The Best Plasma 5 Version Ever"
KDE developers and users are very excited for Plasma 5.27 that will be making its stable debut next week and also serves as the last major release of the Plasma 5 series...
LLVM's Fortran Compiler "Flang" Makes Significant Progress But Not Yet Production Ready
Being worked on actively by a number of stakeholders in recent years has been Flang as a Fortran language front-end to the LLVM compiler stack. While not yet ready for general use, Flang has been making strides as well as showing some promising performance results...
NVIDIA Publishes DLSS Super Resolution SDK 3.1, Including Updated Linux Demo
NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest...
systemd 253 Is Near With RC3 Out For Testing
Systemd 253 is gearing up for release while out today is the third and possibly final release candidate...
Intel Enables Compute-Based Transcoding To DXT5 With Mesa
An Intel engineer has implemented compute-based transcoding support to the DXT5 texture format as part of S3TC texture compression. This new path yields a 56% decrease in upload time for a texture upload micro-benchmark when tested on an Intel Ice Lake system with the Iris Gallium3D driver...
Embree 4.0 Is Running Well On Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids"
This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.
Another Attempt Made To Upstream An Apple Touch Bar Linux Driver
Apple introduced the Touch Bar to their MacBook Pro laptops a half-decade ago as a dynamic touchscreen to replace the function keys on the keyboard. While some MacBook Pro models have already dropped the Touch Bar for not catching on, some community developers in the open-source Linux community continue work on enabling the functionality for the upstream Linux kernel...
Zstd 1.5.4 Released With Many Performance Improvements
After being in development for nearly one year , Zstd 1.5.4 has been released with many "significant performance improvements across multiple scenarios" for this increasingly-used data compression algorithm...
Fedora's New Web-Based Installer UI Is Shaping Up Nicely
Red Hat engineers have been working on a new web-based user-interface for Fedora's installer for more than on year now and it's been worked into good shape while still not at feature parity to the Anaconda installer with its GTK interface. Martin Kolman presented at FOSDEM last weekend on Fedora's new installer UI to offer insight into their motives for making it web-based and what work remains...
Gentoo Had A Busy 2022 With A Weekly LiveGUI ISO, Gpkg Binary Packages For Portage
The Gentoo project has provided a 2022 recap that highlights all of their interesting milestones achieved over the past year for this traditionally source-based Linux distribution that has long been popular with enthusiasts and power users...
hipSYCL Becomes Open SYCL For Targeting All Major CPUs & GPUs
The past few years there has been hipSYCL as an open-source project for not only taking SYCL codes to Radeon ROCm with HIP but also NVIDIA CUDA and other targets. The hipSYCL project has now decided to rename itself to Open SYCL to reflect its broader focus on supporting CPUs and GPUs from all major vendors and not being limited to just AMD's HIP interface...
Linux objtool Improvements Help Reduce RAM Usage & Build Time During Large Kernel Builds
Upstream kernel developers have begun hitting RAM capacity issues when carrying out large Linux kernel builds with the likes of "allyesconfig" for enabling all possible modules/options. While 32GB of system RAM has been common for developer desktops in recent years, large Linux kernel builds and taking advantage of multiple compile jobs have begun to cross that threshold and leading to out-of-memory behavior. Fortunately, a set of patches to the kernel's objtool is taming the memory use to rein in kernel builds for such scenarios...
AMD Re-Enables Scatter/Gather Support For All APUs On Linux
AMD has made some late changes for Linux 6.2 around the Scatter/Gather (S/G) functionality for APUs that enables display scan-out from system memory...
Linux Schedutil Governor's Quirky Behavior Persists In 2023
Earlier this week I posted benchmarks looking at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved in the three years to the day since that 64-core / 128-thread HEDT chip launched. While overall the Threadripper 3990X performance has evolved nicely under Linux since 2020, when it came to the video encoding tests in particular they performed worse overall. As I had raised in that earlier article and now elaborated with some follow-up tests, that regression is driven by the default "schedutil" frequency scaling governor used by default.
Zink Lands A Simple Fix To Boost Doom Performance By ~10x
For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x...
AMD 4th Gen EPYC + Instinct MI300A Supercomputer Heading To Bavaria
AMD and Atos announced today that they are building a new supercomputer in Bavaria for the Max Planck Society...
Intel's Mesa Drivers Begin Preparing For The New Xe Kernel Driver
One of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver milestones we have to look forward to this year is the introduction of the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver to effectively succeed the existing "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for recent generations of Intel graphics. More prep code was merged this week to Mesa's Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver in preparing to be able to make use of that new kernel mode driver once its upstreamed into the Linux kernel...
GTK5 Development Likely To Heat Up Following GTK 4.12
A new GTK blog post summarized a recent meet-up of GTK core developers for better sorting out active GTK4 work as well as some planning toward GTK5...
A Call For More Collaboration & Harmony Among BSD Hardware Drivers
The BSD operating system projects tend to not receive as much support from hardware vendors as Linux and their driver support is made even more fragmented on the BSD side due to many subtle as well as not so subtle differences between the major BSDs. NetBSD developer Pierre Pronchery has proposed more "harmony" among BSD drivers with increased collaboration between the major BSD players on driver development...
FreeType 2.13 Released With New Qt-Based Font Program
FreeType 2.13 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used font rendering library. New to FreeType 2.13 is a new Qt-based demo program...
More Aquacomputer Devices To Be Supported With Linux 6.3
Over the past two years since an Aquacomputer HWMON driver was first introduced to the mainline Linux kernel, it's continued to be extended to support more products from this German PC cooling/peripheral retailer. With Linux 6.3 additional Aquacomputer components are now supported by this kernel driver...
Etnaviv Driver With Linux 6.3 Enables VeriSilicon NPU Cores
The Etnaviv DRM driver started out in the Linux kernel providing reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver support for Vivante graphics IP developed by VeriSilicon and found within various SoCs. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle the Etnaviv DRM driver is adding support for VeriSilicon's Neural Network Processor (NPU) IP...
Linux Disabling High Resolution Scrolling For Logitech Devices Connected Via USB
While there's been a multi-year effort for Wayland high resolution scrolling, support by the desktop environments for this functionality, and all the other infrastructure work, high resolution scrolling is proving to still be a challenge for Linux in 2023. The latest is now the Linux kernel dropping Logitech high resolution scrolling for mice connected via USB until further improvements can be made...
GNOME Is Making It Easier To Track Running Background Apps
A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop...
Godot 4.0 RC1 Released
The open-source Godot 4.0 game engine will finally be released soon while being christened today is the initial release candidate...
Linux Parallel CPU Start-Up Restored For AMD CPUs To Yield Faster Boot Times
The very promising work around parallel CPU bring-up to speed-up Linux kernel boot times with today's high core count servers and HEDT systems has been revised once more. Notable with the v7 patches is re-enabling support for this time-savings boot feature for AMD processors...
Initial Intel Vulkan Video Support Lands In Mesa 23.1
Following yesterday seeing RADV Vulkan Video decoding land in Mesa 23.1, the initial Vulkan Video support for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan driver has also been merged to Mesa 23.1...
AOM AV1 3.6 Brings More Performance & Efficiency Optimizations
Google engineers on Tuesday released AOM AV1 v3.6 as the newest version of their open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder...
GROMACS 2023 Released With Better SYCL For Intel / AMD / NVIDIA
GROMACS as the widely-used molecular dynamics software issued its stable v2023 release this week with improved GPU support via SYCL...
Intel Releases Embree 4.0 With Arc Graphics Support Via SYCL
Intel today introduced Embree 4.0 as a major update to this high performance ray-tracing library...
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