Phoronix

As part of the new OpenBenchmarking.org being developed as part of Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 due out next quarter, some new features were deployed live on OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend...

The Vulkan Portability Extension (VK_KHR_portability_subset) has been released as part of the effort by The Khronos Group in getting Vulkan running on as many platforms as possible, including the likes of Apple macOS/iOS...

As first outlined earlier this year, Intel has been working on the Linux support for Platform Monitoring Technology as a new hardware telemetry feature first introduced with new Tigerlake hardware. It's looking like the initial Intel PMT support will come with Linux 5.10 while further work is being prepared that builds off its foundation...

One of the less talked about open-source graphics drivers talked about is Etnaviv as the reverse-engineered, community-based driver providing OpenGL/GLES support for Vivante graphics IP. While it's still working towards OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance, its performance is currently in some cases competitive -- and even outperforming -- the Vivante proprietary driver...

Not only did Unity Software experience a successful IPO last week but they also rolled out the Unity 2020.2 engine into public beta and with that comes some "major speed-ups" for performance...

Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications...

There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel...

The sixth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.9 is now available with at least two notable changes in particular...

The next version of the Linux kernel will allow monitoring temperatures of the upcoming AMD Zen 3 processors...

Earlier this summer Intel engineers added an OpenVINO back-end to the FFmpeg multimedia framework. OpenVINO as a toolkit for optimized neural network performance on Intel hardware was added to FFmpeg for the same reasons there is TensorFlow and others also supported -- support for DNN-based video filters and other deep learning processing...

In addition to XDC2020 this past week, the Linux Foundation hosted the virtual OpenPOWER Summit North America 2020 event as well with a mix of interesting hardware and software presentations...

It's still not clear when Intel SGX support will be accepted for the mainline Linux kernel...

The Cloud-Hypervisor project that is led by Intel open-source folks for providing a cloud-focused hypervisor written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release...

RenderDoc 1.10 was released on Friday for this leading open-source program supporting frame-capture-based debugging on Vulkan, OpenGL / GLES, and Direct3D across Windows, Linux, and Android along with platforms like Stadia and the Nintendo Switch...

Coming together this year for the mainline Linux kernel was the AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) capability for encrypted video memory support with Radeon GPUs. This topic was talked about at this week's XDC2020 conference...

After working on getting the Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan driver up to OpenGL 4.6 with still pending patches, former Samsung OSG engineer Mike Blumenkrantz has been making remarkable progress on the performance aspect as well...

Intel's software team has released a new version of their Compute Runtime that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities for their graphics hardware on Linux...

KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries characterized this week as "the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week!"..

Introduced last year as part of CUDA 10.2 was libcu++ as the CUDA C++ standard library, which works with not only NVIDIA CUDA enabled configurations but also CPUs. The libcu++ sources are now available via GitHub...

Building off the recent Genode OS 20.08 operating system framework release is now Sculpt OS 20.08 as the open-source project's general purpose operating system attempt...

The second beta of the forthcoming FreeBSD 12.2 is now available with a fair number of prominent changes accumulating over the past week...

Nearly one month ago OpenZFS 2.0 saw its first release candidate while now it's been succeeded by another test candidate in time for some weekend exposure...

Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday...

The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding...

You may recall from earlier this year that the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud costs were growing out of control primarily due to their continuous integration setup. They were seeking sponsorships to help out with these costs but ultimately they've attracted new sponsors while also better configuring/optimizing their CI configuration in order to get those costs back at more manageable levels...

Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)...

Going on for more than four years now has been creating a new /dev/random implementation and this Friday marks the 35th revision to this big set of patches that aim for better performance and security...

Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache...

Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release...

Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa...

Following the Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarks on AMD EPYC and it showing the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel regressing in some workloads, bisecting that issue, and that bringing up the issue of the performance regression over page lock fairness a solution for Linux 5.9 has now landed.

Google engineer Steven Perron has laid out their proposal for an XGL cache creator tool for AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK...

If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop...

NVIDIA has once again managed to provide launch-day Linux driver support for their next-generation graphics processors. Today the NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta driver is shipping for Linux support with the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards...

Valve developer Timur Kristóf who has been spending the past year working on the AMD Compiler "ACO" back-end for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" as well as beginning to port this shader compiler back-end to RadeonSI Gallium3D. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has made incredible progress over the past year -- enough so that it's been the default for Mesa's RADV driver. During XDC2020 Day 2, Timur provided an update on ACO...

Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs...

Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day...

Mesa 20.2 (or 20.2-RC5) didn't debut last week as intended, but for the interim the Mesa 20.1.x release cycle brought 20.1.8 on Wednesday and now it's been extended to having at least a ninth point release to allow more time until not only Mesa 20.2.0 to ship but Mesa 20.2.1 alignment...

Following Wednesday's release of GNOME 3.38 was the surprising news of GNOME 40 being the next version as well as a new initiative to improve GNOME extensions...

AMD previously confirmed it would be supporting real-time ray-tracing with their next-generation GPUs while now one month out from the Radeon RX 6000 series debut are the first signs of the open-source driver work around GPU ray-tracing...

Most information presented during the annual X.Org Developers' Conference doesn't tend to be very surprising or ushering in breaking news, but during today's XDC2020 it was subtly dropped that Arm Holdings appears to now be backing the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver...

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS...

The feature to provide opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on each context switch looks like it will be coming with the Linux 5.10 cycle for this functionality providing security benefits but at the cost of further performance degradation...

Following today's GNOME 3.38 release a new versioning scheme was announced whereby the next release in six months time will be GNOME 40.0...

GNOME 3.38 has shipped as the newest half-year update to this desktop environment and will be featured in the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33, and other autumn Linux distribution updates...

The V3DV driver for providing Vulkan support on the Raspberry Pi 4 is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance and once squaring that away along with other lingering bits they will be pursuing the upstreaming of this driver within Mesa...

XDC2020 as the annual gathering of X.Org developers was due to take place in Poland this year but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to be yet another conference happening exclusively online. Day 1 of XDC2020 has just begun...

Compression expert Rich Geldreich who previously worked for the likes of Valve and Unity prior to co-founding his own consulting firm has now made the Crunch and LZHAM technologies available under the public domain...

After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today...

Gentoo Linux is looking to improve the kernel maintenance experience by offering up Ebuilds that make it easier to maintain the kernel through the package manager -- including prebuilt binary kernels...