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Updated 2025-07-02 05:00
Blender 2.90 Released With Intel Embree Usage, Broader NVIDIA OptiX Support
Blender 2.90 is out as a huge feature update to this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling solution...
Canonical + SUSE Engineers Call For More Extensible Linux System Calls Moving Forward
Aleksa Sarai of SUSE and Christian Brauner of Canonical presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference with a call for more extensible system calls moving forward in aiming to enhance the Linux user-space API...
Red Hat Has Been Working On "stalld" As A Thread Stall Detector + Booster
Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector...
Linux Receiving Generic Casefolding Implementation For File-Systems
In making for easier code re-use among file-systems and allowing a unified implementation to focus on a single code-base for optimizations moving forward, a generic case-folding implementation for Linux file-systems is being prepared for mainline...
Linux Patch Proposed To Double Raspberry Pi 4 Transfer Speed To eMMC/SD Storage
Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled...
A Kernel Maintainer's Prediction On The CPU Architecture Landscape For 2030
In addition to talking about code/hardware obsolescence from the Linux kernel, prominent upstream Linux kernel developer Arnd Bermann also presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the current SoC landscape and sharing his predictions for ten years down the road...
Genode OS 20.08 Has Chromium Web Engine Running, Low-Level GUI Work
The Genode OS project is out with its 20.08 version bump that brings some high profile improvements for this open-source operating system framework...
Linux 5.9-rc3 Is A "Pretty Calm" Release
Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test version of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel...
Is It Time To Overhaul The GNU Dynamic Linker?
At the GNU Tools Track during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat's Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020's...
Nintendo Switch Controller Driver To Be Upstreamed With Linux 5.10
There has been the out-of-tree DKMS hid-nintendo driver to support the Nintendo Switch controller on Linux while with the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year that driver will be merged...
VirtIO-FS DAX Support Close To Mainline For Offering Tremendous Performance Boost
Judging from the latest FUSE Git activity, it's looking like the VirtIO-FS DAX patches that have been around since last year could be merged for Linux 5.10. This can provide a significant speed-up for those making use of this FUSE file-system for sharing files/folders with guest VMs...
Registration Opens For 2020 Virtual LLVM Developers' Meeting
Like most conferences this year, the annual LLVM Developers' Meeting has become an online-only affair...
Wine-Staging 5.16 Begins Adding Patches For Microsoft Flight Simulator
Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.16 as the newest snapshot for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine-Staging 5.16 is now available as the latest release for this more bleeding-edge version of Wine...
Lenovo Starts Offering Up Fedora Linux Pre-Loaded Systems From Their Web Store
As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora...
Facebook Still Pursuing "NetGPU" - Working On AMD GPU Support In Addition To NVIDIA
It was the recent Facebook patches for implementing NetGPU that with one of the NVIDIA-focused patches led to the recent controversy around "GPL condoms" in the kernel and ultimately leading to new protections with Linux 5.9. That NetGPU code is still being worked on by Facebook with upstream hopes but now in addition to the NVIDIA driver support they are also working on AMD GPU support with the open-source driver...
Google Is Still Striving To Upstream Incremental FS In Linux
After originally publishing the Incremental FS patches back in May of 2019, Google's Android kernel team is still working to upstream this virtual file-system into the mainline Linux kernel and at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was working to drum up support for it...
Android AOSP Can Boot Off Mainline Linux 5.9 With Just One Patch
The Android open-source project "AOSP" with its latest code is very close to being able to boot off the mainline Linux kernel when assuming the device drivers are all upstream...
KDE Plasma 5.20 Will Alert You If Your Disk Is Failing
KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week...
Paragon Submits Third Version Of New NTFS Kernel Driver For Linux
Two weeks ago file-system driver vendor Paragon Software posted patches for their previously commercial NTFS Linux driver with hopes of getting the code mainlined. That initial patch drew some criticism for how it was handled but a week later a new version was published that split up the patches nicely and had other feedback. Prior to calling it a weekend, Paragon sent out a third version of the "NTFS3" Linux kernel driver patches...
NVIDIA's DALI 0.25 Deep Learning Library Adds AArch64 SBSA, Performance Improvements
DALI is the project at NVIDIA focused on GPU-accelerated data augmentation and image loading along with other tasks while being optimized for deep learning workflows. DALI 0.25 was released on Friday as the latest step forward for this open-source NVIDIA project...
LunarG Introduces New Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig)
The friends at LunarG who maintain the Vulkan SDK today announced their new Vulkan Configurator tool, accessible via the vkconfig command and installed as part of the SDK...
Wine 5.16 Released With Support For AVX Registers
Wine 5.16 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release leading up to next year's Wine 6.0...
Google Engineer Calls For Greater Collaboration On Speculative Execution Mitigations
When it comes to kernel address space isolation (ASI) and other yet-to-be-merged security features around fending off speculative execution attacks, there are multiple concurrent efforts by many of the public cloud providers and other hyperscalers. A Google engineer at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference has called for more collaboration in this area to ideally provide a unified solution...
AMD AOCC 2.2 Helping Squeeze Extra Performance Out Of AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" CPUs
At the end of June AMD quietly released a new version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. Noticing the new release this week, here are some benchmarks of AOCC 2.2 up against LLVM Clang 10 and GCC 10 with Ubuntu Linux while running from an AMD EPYC 7742 2P server for looking at the performance gains possible with the compiler optimizations.
Mesa 20.2 Should Be Released In About Two Weeks - LLVMpipe OpenGL 4.5 Enabled
After forgetting to release last week, Mesa 20.2-RC3 is out as the newest test build of this quarterly Mesa3D feature release for the collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers...
OpenSUSE Jump Distribution Now Available For Alpha Testing
An alpha prototype of openSUSE "Jump" is now available for testing of this new build of openSUSE...
SuperTuxKart 1.2 Brings Better Gamepad Support, Other Features
For those looking at enjoying some open-source Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.2 is out as the Mario Kart inspired racing game that is cross-platform and features the Linux mascot Tux...
Google Using AutoFDO On Linux Meant Up To 12% Less Cycles Spent Within The Kernel
While a Microsoft engineer was at Linux Plumbers Conference this week talking up their LTO and PGO optimization work for the Linux kernel, Google engineers have now one upped that work by also shipping kernels with AutoFDO optimizations...
ROCm 3.7 Has Open-Source OpenCL Image Module Included
With last week's release of ROCm 3.7 for the Radeon Open Compute stack, it turns out there is a welcome change that wasn't published as part of the announcement...
Fedora 34 Aims To Shrink Its Install Media By Ramping Up Compression
While Fedora 33 hasn't even been released yet, Fedora 34 is already seeing new feature proposals...
Linux Developers Continue Evaluating The Path To Adding Rust Code To The Kernel
As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference and it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be...
The Current NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Performance Ahead Of Ampere
With NVIDIA next week expected to launch their next-generation GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" graphics cards, here is a fresh look at the current GeForce RTX 2000 series performance up against the latest AMD Radeon competition when using the very latest Linux graphics drivers for both vendors. This is the very latest performance showdown right now for the AMD/NVIDIA GPU performance under various Linux and Steam Play games on Ubuntu.
AMD Radeon GPU Offloading For GCC Still Maturing In 2020
When it comes to Radeon GPU offloading for compute, most of the emphasis placed by AMD has been on Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) and now as part of that as well is the AOMP compiler for OpenMP targeting the AMD GPUs. Both ROCm and AOMP along with their other graphics driver components like RadeonSI and AMDVLK target an LLVM-based compiler stack as their principal focus, but they do continue engaging with Mentor Graphics who leads the development work on a Radeon GPU back-end for GCC...
Microsoft Is Exploring LTO+PGO For A Faster Linux Kernel
While more and more software vendors are employing link-time optimizations (LTO) and profile-guided optimizations (PGO) for leveraging the compiler to squeeze out performance, it may surprise many that Microsoft engineers are exploring LTO+PGO for the Linux kernel in their own quest of achieving greater Linux performance...
Linux Per Thread Queues Aim For Traffic Isolation, Higher Performance Networking
The newest Linux networking feature to get excited about that's in development is PTQ, or Per Thread Queues...
Intel's Early Linux 5.10 Graphics Driver Changes Include Tiger Lake HOBL
While the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle is still young and not seeing its formal release until early October or so, Intel's open-source team has already submitted to DRM-Next their first batch of feature changes desired for Linux 5.10...
LLVM Clang Will Finally Honor "-mtune=" On x86/x86_64 CPUs
Starting with LLVM Clang 12.0 next year, the Clang compiler on x86/x86_64 CPUs will finally honor -mtune= in a similar manner to GCC...
Ubuntu To Try Again In Switching IPTables To Use Nftables Backend
Back during the Ubuntu 20.04 cycle there was an attempt to switch the iptables back-end to Nftables by default. That plan was ultimately foiled by LXD at the time running into issues and other fallout. But now t hat those issues should be addressed and Debian Buster has switched to Nftables, the move is being re-attempted next week for Ubuntu 20.10...
Mesa Softpipe Set To See Better Performance, Introducing New NIR-To-TGSI Path
Mesa Gallium3D is close to seeing a major change in their intermediate representation path for drivers consuming Gallium's TGSI rather than NIR directly. Eric Anholt has been working on a NIR-to-TGSI path so that drivers still relying on TGSI can benefit from the NIR optimization paths and improvements while ultimately hoping to eliminate the existing GLSL-to-TGSI code-path currently relied upon by these drivers...
NVIDIA's Director of Software Development Talks Up Open-Source
While NVIDIA's desktop graphics drivers may not be open-source, there are other open-source projects maintained by NVIDIA that we have covered over the years particularly in the high performance computing and visual design space, among other interesting bits. Dirk Van Gelder who is NVIDIA's Direct of Software Development gave a talk this week about some of the open-source efforts engaged in by the company...
Kernel ASI Still Being Worked On For Protecting Against Hyper Threading Data Leaks
At this week's Linux Plumbers Conference there were DigitalOcean engineers providing an update on their CoreScheduling work in the era of vulnerabilities affecting Hyper Threading. Oracle meanwhile presented today at LPC2020 on their Kernel Address Space Isolation (ASI) functionality for dealing with Hyper Threading data leakage in a different manner, but the performance costs are still being evaluated...
Wine-Mono Won't Bother With .NET 5.0 - The Official Microsoft Binaries Should Work Fine
Microsoft announced on Tuesday that the .NET 5.0 release is now "feature complete" for this major overhaul of .NET that breaks compatibility with prior versions. Microsoft .NET 5.0 has many changes to its libraries and runtimes, introduces WebAssembly support, support for single file applications/executables, new APIs, better performance, and much more...
GNOME 3.38 Beta 2 Released With Many Fixes
Ahead of the official GNOME 3.38 launch in September, the second GNOME 3.38 beta (v3.35.91) is now available for testing,..
Linux Might Better Plan Its Code/Hardware Obsolescence From The Kernel
One of the many interesting discussions for this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference is on planning code obsolescence moving forward. While this is about kernel features too, it's also about the steps and when to phase out old hardware support...
Qt Creator 4.13 Release Brings Initial Meson Support, Updates C++ Code Model
The Qt Company has released version 4.13 of Qt Creator as their Qt/C++ focused integrated development environment that also supports Python and other languages via the Language Server Protocol...
Real-Time / PREEMPT_RT Support Should Finally Be Mainlined Soon In The Linux Kernel
In 2019 there were kernel developers talking at conferences that the remaining "PREEMPT_RT" patches for a real-time kernel should be mainlined in early 2020. That didn't happen for the long ongoing work around the "RT" patches while at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2020) is that the work should finally be close to merging to mainline...
Linux 5.10 To Bring Support For Matrox G200 Desktop Graphics Cards
Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10...
X.Org Server 1.20.9 Released With Numerous XWayland Fixes
With no one stepping up to manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release, the two year old X.Org Server 1.20 series continues seeing new point releases, particularly with 1.21 being out of the scope already for having the chance to appear in the major H2'2020 Linux distribution releases. X.Org Server 1.20.9 is the newest point release out today in shipping fixes...
Mozilla's GFX-RS 0.8 Released For Vulkan Portability - Brings Big Changes
Following the recent layoffs at Mozilla and some projects seemingly at risk moving forward, one that we have been worried about is GFX-RS as the interesting Rust-based library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative using GFX-HAL...
OpenZFS 2.0-RC1 Released With Unified Linux/BSD Support, Zstd Compression & Much More
The first release candidate of the forthcoming OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing on both Linux and BSD systems...
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