AMD mentioned Fine-Grain Clock Gating as one of the new features for the Radeon RX 6000 series with "Big Navi" but it will also be present with the next-gen Van Gogh APU too. The Linux driver patches for bringing up FGCG are under review...
Valve has published their latest Steam Survey results. For October 2020 the Linux gaming marketshare pulled back or at least not keeping up with the pace of Steam's growing user-base...
The Zink Gallium3D driver that implements OpenGL on top of Vulkan has been on quite a roll recently... Beyond reaching OpenGL 4.6 support in yet-to-be-merged patches and passing ~97% of the Piglit OpenGL tests and increasingly good performance compared to Intel's OpenGL driver, the latest interesting milestone is seeing initial work on bringing Zink to macOS...
For any of you that happen to still be relying on the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system or interested in the technical design of Reiser5, these file-system drivers have been updated for Linux 5.9 compatibility...
Following this summer's big round of layoffs at Mozilla, the organization's deep learning open-source speech-to-text engine has been among the projects considered at risk. Fortunately, at least for now, DeepSpeech is still moving forward and is up to version 0.9...
Landing in Mesa 20.3 during this final week of feature development is support in RadeonSI Gallium3D for EGL_EXT_protected_surface. This long-standing EGL extension allows surfaces/windows to beset as protected and in which case the contents are only accessible to secure accesses. Outside/insecure accesses to the window (surface) contents are blocked...
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.
For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates...
While Linux 5.10-rc2 is coming later today and a week past the merge window, a notable late pull request sent in this morning by Greg Kroah-Hartman is removing the Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture drivers, a.k.a. Xeon Phi...
At the Linux Foundation's KVM Forum 2020 this week, Stefano Garzarella of Red Hat presented on the possibility of speeding up virtual machine I/O performance by sharing the host's IO_uring queues with guests. In doing so the virtual machines have near bare-metal performance with the proposed patches...
Earlier this year the Linux kernel landed split lock detection for being able to detect and optionally kill processes leading to a split lock since it can cause measurable performance issues and even possible unprivileged denial of service...
September marked a decade since the OpenIndiana project was announced for continuing on with the OpenSolaris code-base (and ultimately based on Illumos) in being born out of the justified and proven accurate concerns when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source operating system...
Another month in the books, another month closer to the end of the dreadful 2020. It was at least an eventful October with 268 original news articles and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews. The content ranged from the continuous Linux kernel advancements to exciting hardware announcements...
The Wine program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms can run on a number of different architectures, but Wine doesn't handle the emulation of running Windows x86/x64 binaries on other architectures like 64-bit ARM or PowerPC. But that's what the Wine-based Hangover is about with currently allowing those conventional Windows binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) and 64-bit POWER too...
Laptop vendors recently disclosed "Xe MAX" graphics as discrete Intel graphics set to appear within laptops in the coming weeks. That announcement was a bit unexpected and Intel did not brief the media in advance while today -- in an unusual announcement for a Saturday (Intel says it's timed for system availability, seemingly first in China) -- the company is formally announcing Iris Xe MAX.
This week brought the release of AMD's ROCm 3.9 as their open-source compute stack for Radeon GPUs. With ROCm 3.9 the AOMP work for LLVM/Clang-based compiler with OpenMP offload capabilities to Radeon GPUs was integrated. AOMP though is still advancing independently of the ROCm releases with Friday night marking the release of AOMP 11.11...
It's looking like Paragon Software's "NTFS3" read-write Linux driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system is on a trajectory where we could see it land possibly with the Linux 5.11 kernel kicking off at year's end. Friday marked the eleventh iteration of these patches that Paragon previously offered to commercial customers but is now in the process of being upstreamed...
Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation...
The Linux kernel's frame-buffer console (FBCON) is set to drop accelerated scrolling support since it isn't widely used and now found to be "full of bugs" plaguing the code-base...
Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications...
Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 is out this morning as the latest version of the company's open-source graphics compute stack for HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support...
On top of the AMD Zen L3 cache optimizations hitting Mesa 20.3 today, Marek Olšák has also landed his RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code for optimizing OpenGL uber shaders...
You may recall going back to 2018 that well known open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olsak was working on Mesa optimizations around the AMD Zen architecture. In particular, better handling of Mesa for Zen's L3 cache design. A rewritten implementation of that has now landed along with some other improvements...
More than a decade ago Linux users tended to be envious of Sun Microsystems' Solaris for ZFS and DTrace as the two most interesting technical selling points of the platform. In that time OpenZFS is now extremely vibrant for offering ZFS on BSD and Linux systems while DTrace is barely brought up these days. This tracing framework originally developed for Solaris was fantastic back in the day but over the years Linux has stepped up its game with various efforts. Now as we hit the end of 2020, Oracle engineers continue working on bringing better DTrace support to Linux...
At the start of October we mentioned a kernel optimization that can help IO_uring performance. Now as we approach the end of the month, Linux 5.11 is poised to land the optimization that especially helps out with threaded workloads...
When Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) initially debuted there were a few different steps that needed to be carried out for setting up this Linux binary compatibility layer atop Windows. But now with the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview builds it's becoming increasingly trivial to get going with WSL...
Last week we were first to report on a PCI ID being added for a Navi 1 "Blockchain" graphics card without display outputs and seemingly focused on cryptocurrency mining. This card wasn't talked about at yesterday's Radeon RX 6000 series launch but that support is now on the way to the Linux 5.10 kernel...
If you've been waiting to port your software to RISC-V until having a decent RISC-V system where you can develop on-host, wanting to experiment with the libre processor architecture or even use it as a daily desktop system, or just wanting a Linux system that's not x86_64 / ARM / POWER, SiFive today is announcing a new board today that is the most promising yet. The SiFive HiFive Unmatched is the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date and the closest to being the first "RISC-V PC" for Linux use.
While 11th Gen "Rocket Lake" desktop processors aren't expected to be released until the end of Q1'2021, given the interest building around AMD Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, Intel revealed a few more details today about their next-generation wares...
Timed with today's (limited) availability of the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics cards, the NVIDIA Unix driver team has released the 455.38 Linux driver with support for this new Ampere graphics card plus tucking in a few new features and fixes too...
As we roll into 2021 the Free Software Foundation is looking to update its high priority free software projects list. These are the software projects that should be incorporating "the most important threats, and most critical opportunities, that free software faces in the modern computing landscape." For now the FSF is looking for help deciding what to include...
Earlier this year was the surprising move of Intel's oneDNN neural network library adding AArch64 support and that was then complemented by adding IBM POWER support to this neural network library that is part of their oneAPI collection. Now with the latest oneDNN 2.0 beta they have furthered the support and performance for non-Intel hardware...
A new version of the AMD Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) has been released on the same day as the company announcing the Radeon RX 6800/6900 series. Meet ROCm 3.9...
Intel's open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing! This is in preparation for next year's Xe HPG graphics card that will feature hardware-accelerated ray-tracing...
There was talk earlier this year of mainlining the real-time Linux kernel patches after similar discussions last year didn't result in it happening. Merging the RT code didn't happen for the recent Linux 5.10 merge window but at least the out-of-tree patches were quickly re-based for Linux 5.9 stable and 5.10-rc1...
Version 2.0 of Pyston is now available, the Python implementation originally started by Dropbox that builds on LLVM JIT for offering faster Python performance...
Lisa Su is about to begin the presentation unveiling the much anticipated Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" (RDNA 2) graphics cards. This article will be updated live as the event progresses but first up let's recap the current Linux open-source driver state for these forthcoming graphics cards.
Adam Jackson who on Red Hat's Graphics Team served as the X.Org Server release manager for many years and being heavily involved in the xorg-server development and related components as shared his views on whether the X.Org Server is "abandonware."..
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