Phoronix

Solaris 11.4 continues chugging along per the Oracle/Solaris maintenance terms but still with no signs of life beyond the 11.4 series with any radical changes. The twenty-fourth stable release update was issued on Tuesday for Oracle Solaris 11.4...

There are just a handful of games like Battlefield 4, Thief, and others that can make use of AMD's long-deprecated Mantle graphics API as the predecessor to modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and Direct3D 12. Mantle never was brought to Linux given the emphasis quickly turned to Vulkan within The Khronos Group, but now with the open-source "GRVK" project it's being mapped on top of Vulkan...

Given the uncertainty created by Mozilla laying off roughly a quarter of their staff last week that did include some Rust developers and in looking to further along the Rust ecosystem in its own right, the Rust core developers in cooperation with Mozilla are working to form the Rust Foundation...

A few weeks back Alibaba announced the "XT910" as the fastest RISC-V processor featuring 16 cores and clock speeds up to 2.5GHz while being manufactured on a 12nm node. This by far beats most RISC-V hardware currently available and now at this week's Hot Chips conference the Chinese company is reporting that the XT910 is faster than an Arm Cortex-A73...

TensorFlow Lite for AI inference on mobile devices now has support for making use of OpenCL on Android devices. In doing so, the TFLite performance presents around a 2x speed-up over the existing OpenGL back-end...

Ahead of the big Qt 6.0 release expected before the end of the year, Debian's current Qt package maintainers have decided to step down...

NVIDIA today released 450.66 as their latest stable Linux graphics driver update...

More than a dozen patches were merged by a Microsoft engineer into Mesa yesterday...

As written about at the start of the month, well known GNOME contributor Daniel van Vugt of Canonical/Ubuntu has added tackling deep color support to his TODO list for being able to properly handle 30-bit color on the desktop...

Continuing on with all of the OpenCL Mesa work that's been going on by Red Hat developers in recent time, LLVM's libclc library now has support for targeting Mesa SPIR-V...

Edward Shishkin continues pushing ahead with not only maintaining the existing out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system code but also developing Reiser5 seemingly without any major corporate support. Reiser4 and the experimental Reiser5 file-system code were updated on Monday for Linux 5.8 kernel compatibility...

It landed sooner than anticipated but the LLVMpipe patches enabling OpenGL 4.5 support were merged to Mesa 20.3-devel today and are also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 20.2 series soon to be promoted to stable...

Complementing Amazon's recently launched EPYC 7002 "Rome" CPUs in the EC2 cloud, the "c5a" series has now been extended with the "c5ad" line-up of AMD EPYC Rome processors that now have local NVMe-based solid-state storage directly attached. Initial tests of the Amazon EC2 C5ad instances are promising and indeed offering better value than the comparable Intel Xeon instances.

While Raptor Computing Systems has been making fabulous 100% open-source/libre hardware systems based around POWER9 with the likes of their Talos II and Blackbird systems, don't hold your breath on quickly seeing fully-open POWER10 systems even with "OpenPOWER" being trumpeted in recent years and similar for being more open-source friendly than the likes of Intel and AMD...

SiFive today announced OpenFive as their custom silicon business now spun into its own self-contained, autonomous unit...

Red Hat's David Airlie has been on quite a spree lately with open-source graphics driver improvements from OpenGL 4 for LLVMpipe to now merging "VALLIUM" for a Vulkan software implementation...

Version 20.08 of Kdenlive has been released, the KDE-aligned open-source non-linear video editor platform that is among the best in the field for open-source, community-driven projects...

After covering the Linux/open-source POWER10 bring-up for a number of months already, IBM has finally announced firm information on their forthcoming POWER10 processors. POWER10 looks promising but these 7nm CPUs will not begin shipping until the second half of next year...

Going back many months have been work on making Wine work nicely on 64-bit POWER (POWER9) for ultimately being able to handle Windows programs on IBM POWER/OpenPOWER hardware. The latest Wine work has now been sent out for benefiting this CPU architecture popular with free software purists...

For years Mesa's LLVMpipe software rasterizer has been bound to OpenGL 3.3 support but finally in recent months Red Hat's David Airlie has been tackling OpenGL 4.x support... Right now in Mesa it's at OpenGL 4.3 but there are patches seemingly to be mainlined very soon that will take it up to OpenGL 4.5...

As expected Linus Torvalds has christened Linux 5.9-rc1 to mark the end of the merge window and new feature development of Linux 5.9 as another featureful update that will debut as stable this autumn...

Linux 5.9-rc1 is set to be released this evening in marking the end of the two-week long merge window where new features are introduced for the cycle.

Today marks twenty-seven years since the late Ian Murdock started Debian as one of the original Linux distributions. It was on 16 August 1993 when Ian Murdock started this distribution while it wasn't until September when he released the first version. Debian remains one of the oldest Linux-based distributions / operating systems. Over the years Debian has gone on to power numerous other Linux distributions like Ubuntu and SteamOS while continuing to experience much success in its own right as well...

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released earlier this month, with the code branching having already happened earlier this summer, there are a number of changes already accumulating in the code-base for LibreOffice 7.1...

SQLite 3.33 is out as the latest update to this widely-used, embed-friendly database library used by countless applications and other software...

Back in June after Intel first published the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) specification, the open-source/Linux patches were quick to come by their large software team. That work has continued over the summer in ensuring the Linux ecosystem and developers are ready for Intel AMX programming come next year with Sapphire Rapids...

Picolibc is a newer C library implementation written by longtime free software developer Keith Packard with a focus on being lightweight for embedded systems. Last year marked the release of Picolibc 1.0 while work on it hasn't let up...

With the mainline NTFS driver in the Linux kernel offering read-only support for this widely-used Microsoft file-system and the more popular "ntfs-3g" driver being FUSE-based, Paragon Software is looking to mainline their read-write driver into the mainline kernel tree as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS kernel driver. But in the current state it's not clear if the driver will be accepted...

GNOME 3.37.90 has been released this weekend to serve as the beta of the upcoming GNOME 3.38 desktop release...

Merged last week to Linux 5.9 were the main set of power management updates while hitting the kernel now are some last minute power-related changes...

System76 has been on a spree of interesting hardware launches this year and their next one is a new Bonobo WS ultra high-end laptop...

Following the release yesterday of Wine 5.15, Wine-Staging 5.15 is out this morning and is coming in slightly smaller as a result of the XACT Engine work being upstreamed...

KDE developers remain very busy tacking new features onto Plasma 5.20 and other improvements for polishing their desktop...

As reported a few days ago the NFS server with Linux 5.9 saw user xattr support finally merged for user-extended attributes as defined by RFC 8276. The NFS client changes have now been sent in for this kernel and include the user xattr support along with other changes...

While RISC-V is flourishing when it comes to this open-source CPU architecture, the related OpenRISC architecture is still advancing but not seeing as much hardware efforts around it. In any case, the Linux kernel support continues improving for OpenRISC and with Linux 5.9 are more improvements...

Wine 5.15 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for this program allowing Windows games/applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux and other platforms...

Intel has published a whitepaper on their new TDX "Trust Domain Extensions" technology for better securing virtual machines...

Back in Linux 5.4 Xen 32-bit PV guest support was deprecated while now for Linux 5.9 it's set to be removed entirely. Last year's deprecation comes with the 32-bit usage dwindling in general but PVH being preferred to PV, Meltdown mitigations not being present, and the code not seeing much activity. Now for Linux 5.9 that support is being gutted...

Over the months ahead with Apple preparing future desktops/laptops with their in-house Apple silicon built on the ARM 64-bit architecture, Wine developers are beginning to eye how to support these future 64-bit ARM systems with macOS Big Sur...

Stemming from the recent discussions over NVIDIA NetGPU code that relied on another shim for interfacing between NVIDIA's proprietary driver and the open-source kernel code, a new patch is on the way for Linux 5.9 to fight back against such efforts...

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is among the early rolling-release distributions now shipping a Linux 5.8-based kernel by default...

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 20.04.1, the prior Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 Long Term Support series are also seeing new releases...

It's been nearly three months without a new DXVK release for mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API while finally today there is a big feature release out...

The popular, cross-platform Unity game engine is planning for a very exciting 2021...

KDE has shipped their latest collection of applications with newest feature updates...

This week Intel held their 2020 Architecture Day, albeit virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of interesting technical information was shared on both the hardware and software sides. Here are some of the interesting highlights.

At Intel's Architecture Day this week the company was talking about work on their new Windows graphics driver that is being timed for Xe but supporting existing generations of hardware as well. One of the interesting takeaways was seeing the Windows driver is now using the open-source "IGC" back-end...

Recently I wrote about it looking like oneAPI 1.0 was lining up and now there is further confirmation of the first production release of this Intel software collection indeed coming this year...

The Qt Company today issued the first release candidate of their forthcoming Qt Creator 4.13 integrated development environment as well as a beta of their Qt Design Studio 1.6...

Of various criticisms around FUSE for implementing file-systems in user-space, one of the most prolific issues is around the performance generally being much lower than a proper file-system kernel driver. But with the FUSE passthrough functionality that continue to be worked on, there is the potential for much better FUSE file-system performance...