2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up...
There have not been many AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver releases this quarter, but out today in any case is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 as their newest update to this official open-source Vulkan driver derived in part from shared sources with the AMD Vulkan Windows driver...
One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since...
Feature work of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver work for Linux 5.7 is winding down now that Linux 5.6 is almost to its sixth release candidate this weekend, but sent in this week by AMD were a few more AMDGPU items though mostly amounting to fixes for their graphics driver...
In addition to WebAssembly's growing presence outside of the web browser thanks to various desktop run-times and interesting use-cases, WebAssembly is also popping up in other areas. Google has been working on WebAssembly support for extensions within network proxies typically reserved for C/C++ or the likes of Lua scripts...
On Tuesday the Load Value Injection (LVI) attack was disclosed by Intel and security researchers as a new class of transient-execution attacks and could lead to injecting data into a victim program and in turn stealing data, including from within SGX enclaves. While Intel has publicly stated they don't believe the LVI attack to be practical, one of their open-source compiler wizards did go ahead and add mitigation options to the GNU Assembler as part of the GCC toolchain. Here are benchmarks showing the performance impact of enabling those new LVI mitigation options and the significant impact they can cause on run-time performance in real-world workloads.
While Windows and Linux have seen good 802.11ac "WiFi 5" support and these days are focused on 802.11ax "WiFi 6" with the latest wireless chipsets, FreeBSD is still tackling 802.11ac. But the FreeBSD Foundation is prepared to soon begin sponsoring development work on ironing out their 802.11ac support...
It's been seven years since Intel launched the "Bay Trail" Atom processors and the Linux fixes for it and the succeeding Cherry Trail continue to materialize for the kernel...
Wasmer 0.16 is released as the newest version of this "universal WebAssembly runtime" for running WebAssembly programs on the desktop that could in turn be written in a number of different programming languages...
With the release of Firefox 74.0 yesterday and that also pushing Firefox 75.0 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux of Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta, both out-of-the-box and when force enabling WebRender...
Yesterday the Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability was disclosed by Intel and researchers and affecting newer Intel CPUs with SGX and requiring mitigations outside of all the speculative execution mitigations the past two years. The GNU Assembler patches adding new options for mitigation have now been merged to Git master...
A Google researcher has been developing "LoadLibrary" as a means of being able to load Windows Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that in turn can be used by native Linux code...
Prolific ACO shader compiler back-end developer Timur Kristóf has managed to land his latest improvements in Mesa 20.1-devel for this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end supported so far by the RADV Vulkan driver...
GNOME 3.36 is slated to be released today so here is a look back at much of the prominent work being introduced in this six month update to the GNOME desktop...
SDL 2.0.12 is now available as the latest stable update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer that is the library commonly used by cross-platform games as a hardware/software abstraction layer...
Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far...
The newest open-source project out of Amazon Web Services is Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed for hosting containers and largely written in Rust code...
We've known that Intel's P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the "powersave" governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the "performance" governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency...
Load Value Injection (LVI) is being disclosed today as a new class of transient-execution attacks and the researchers claim can defeat all existing mitigations around Meltdown, Foreshadow, Zombieload, RIDL and Fallout. The researchers say LVI can affect virtually any access to memory and compiler-based mitigations can be expensive...
With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring there is going to be a new exFAT file-system drive developed by Samsung as outlined last week. While that is being added to the formal file-system area of the kernel rather than staging so both could co-exist for a transition period, already with Linux 5.7 will be the removal of the existing staging driver...
RenderDoc 1.7 is out today for this cross-platform graphics debugging/profiling tool that supports Vulkan, Direct3D, and OpenGL graphics APIs across all major platforms...
While we are very excited for Firefox 75 with Wayland and video acceleration improvements along with maturing Flatpak support, out today is Firefox 74.0 as the newest version of Mozilla's web browser...
Sculpt OS is the general purpose operating system built off the Genode operating system framework. Out now is their version 20.02 update that tries to make the OS more approachable...
The LibreOffice open-source office suite's Qt5 tool-kit integration so far has lacked HiDPI scaling support for dealing with modern high pixel density displays. But adding to the excitement for the LibreOffice 7.0 release later this year is now the Qt5 HiDPI scaling capability...
Mozilla engineers have been making good progress on being able to ship a Flatpak'ed Firefox web browser for better security/sandboxing and easier distribution on Linux systems...
Last week Basemark launched their Basemark GPU 1.2 benchmark that now includes Linux support alongside all other major supported desktop and mobile operating systems. We've been testing out this Linux version with OpenGL and Vulkan support on both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce hardware.
Compression experts Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt with their Binomial consulting firm are about to release a high-quality open-source compression codec for GPUs...
While the Debian archive continues to be built with the GCC compiler by default and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, Debian developers do continue experimenting with building the Debian archive under LLVM's Clang...
After running behind schedule from the planned release last month and an extra release candidate being warranted, LLVM 10.0 should be releasing this coming weeks along with its sub-projects -- most notably, the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler. Here is a look at the big ticket items of LLVM/Clang 10.0...
Not many AMD Radeon Linux gamers have been using the "sisched" SI machine instruction scheduler in recent times. This non-default scheduler hasn't been well maintained. Additionally, when on the RADV Vulkan driver, using the Valve-backed compiler back-end has been far superior. As such, SISCHED has now been gutted out of Mesa...
While the cross-distribution AppStream specification standardizes the software component metadata for use by Linux software centers/stores, it turns out many open-source developers aren't interested in or time limited by learning the spec and maintaining the metadata. As such, Matthias Klumpp has now developed the MetaInfo Creator for easily creating this important cross-distro metadata for packages...
Not only have GNOME developers been fixing many bugs this week ahead of the 3.36 stable desktop release next week, but coincidentally KDE developers were also going heavy on the bug fixes this week...
Over the past year Debian developers have been working towards APT 2.0 while now it is officially released for the advanced package tool on Debian, Ubuntu, and other DEB-based platforms...
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