Phoronix

This summer Intel disabled frame-buffer compression for Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. While FBC helps conserve memory bandwidth and can be beneficial to power-savings, under-run issues and related problems resorted Intel to disabling this common feature for Tiger Lake...

Earlier this year we reported on Linux kernel work for better handling Windows games/apps that make system call instructions that bypass the Windows API. Directly making the system calls without going through the WinAPI has become an increasingly common occurrence for modern Windows games, likely as part of their Digital Rights Management schemes. Syscall User Dispatch is now the latest take on that effort...

The second release candidate of Mesa 20.3 is now available for testing ahead of its likely stable debut in early December...

Announced during the summer was Intel's Maple Ridge controller in the form of the Intel JHL8540 / JHL8340 chips as their first discrete Thunderbolt / USB4 controllers. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way...

The last piece of the puzzle to the open-source AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT driver support is now upstream in its respective location...

While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 was released, AMD has made good on their word to provide punctual AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for their new RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards and that has resulted in a new AMDVLK release...

Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server...

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software...

In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it...

Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits...

Now here is some darn interesting software news from SC20... AMD, which is in the process of acquiring Xilinx, is bringing the Radeon Open eCosystem "ROCm" stack to Xilinx hardware...

While Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support wasn't a focus for the initial Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" graphics cards by AMD engineers, that is fortunately changing for both the RX 5000/6000 series moving forward. With the Radeon RX 6800 series there is at-launch support available with working OpenCL provided by the "ROCr" (runtime) path in their packaged driver. Now that we have looked at the Radeon RX 6800 Linux gaming performance here are some initial OpenCL compute benchmarks between NVIDIA and AMD Radeon on Linux.

Radeon Software for Linux 20.45 is now available as the Radeon RX 6800 series launch driver for Linux systems...

Today is the big day: Big Navi is shipping! This also means we can talk at length finally about the Linux support and performance for the Radeon RX 6800 series and how well they perform for Linux gaming. Here is a look at the Linux driver state for these initial RDNA 2 graphics cards and their performance capabilities with the multiple different open-source driver stacks available.

The Qt Company has released their public beta of the forthcoming Qt Design Studio 2.0, their software for quickly and easily designing user interfaces with an emphasis on UI design for non-programmers...

More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12...

For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa...

GraalVM continues its quest as the virtual machine not only supporting Java but also additional languages and execution modes with a focus on stellar performance and speedy startups. GraalVM CE 20.3 was released on Tuesday as the latest for this open-source package supporting Java, Node.js, an LLVM runtime, and more...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the recent proposal for introducing a new spin that features the KDE Plasma desktop for 64-bit ARM (AArch64)...

Joshua Ashton, known for his work with Valve on D9VK and then DXVK for mapping Direct3D on top of Vulkan, is making more strides in their Direct3D 12 effort with VKD3D-Proton...

With Firefox 83 released, like clock-work Mozilla has released the beta of Firefox 84...

One day ahead of the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT, AMD has merged support for AV1 decode support on these RDNA2 GPUs into Mesa...

In addition to the release of Firefox 83 today (along with word Servo is moving to the Linux Foundation), over in Google land they have shipped Chrome 87...

In soliciting for year-end donations, the GNOME Foundation shares some of how they plan to use generated funds over the next years...

Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation...

Firefox 83.0 is now shipping as a notable update to the Mozilla web browser and this time around are some exciting changes...

Intel's SGX enclaves support patches for the Linux kernel have been through 40+ rounds of review at this point over the past many months as they try to get this security feature into the mainline Linux kernel. But SGX isn't the only Intel security feature that's been having a long process for mainlining: Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) is in a similar boat...

Another round of Intel graphics driver changes were submitted last week to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.11 merge window...

AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 is out this morning as the newest source snapshot of this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver...

The Linux kernel's stateless video decoder interface is used for video decoding where no state needs to be kept between processed video frames and allows for independently decoding each video frame. The H.264 stateless decode interface for the Linux kernel has been in the works for a few years and is now deemed ready and stable for dealing with modern stateless codecs...

While Intel is normally very punctual with their Linux hardware support and ensure that the full capabilities of the hardware are exposed under Linux, especially when it comes to server and workstation hardware, occasionally oversights are made...

It's still short of the full OpenCL 3.0 implementation, but more of the CL 3.0 enablement patches for Gallium3D's "Clover" OpenCL state tracker have now been merged into Mesa 20.1-devel..

As was expected, formal feature development is now over for GCC 11 and it's time for bug fixing...

AMD is marking the SC20 virtual conference this week by launching the AMD Instinct MI100 accelerator, which is based on their CDNA architecture. Also notable and coinciding with the MI100 launch is the Radeon Open eCosystem 4.0 (ROCm 4.0) Linux release.

But can't tell you yet how it performs.....

It's been a while since having any major break-through changes to talk about for GNOME contributed by Canonical's prolific developer Daniel Van Vugt, but he's been at the grind making progress on some big ticket items...

The work reported on back in October for RAPL PowerCap patches for AMD Zen CPUs from Zen 1 through Zen 3 are set to arrive with Linux 5.11 in early 2021...

Longtime Linux users still likely cringe when hearing "Poulsbo" as Intel's first-generation Atom processors that featured "GMA 500" graphics that were based on Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX IP. The Linux driver support was just awful and now as we prepare for 2021 the Intel Linux kernel driver might just drop its 2D acceleration support for Poulsbo and the short-lived Moorestown platform...

Traditionally we should be past the half-way point of the release cycle at the fourth weekly release candidate, but with today's RC4 release of Linux 5.10 the activity hasn't calmed down at all...

Google engineers are already working on WebP2 as the next-generation version of their still image file format...

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.10 kernel is Thunderbolt support for Tiger Lake H...

KDE Plasma Mobile continues working its way into increasing polished form and with deployments on the likes of the PinePhone have shown it can be quite a capable open-source mobile Linux contender...

For those looking to experiment with some BSD desktop operating systems this weekend, FreeBSD-based MidnightBSD 2.0 is out along with NetBSD-based os108 9.1...

The open-source, cross-platform LuxCoreRender physically based renderer is closing in on its version 2.5 release and most noticeable is supporting NVIDIA's OptiX library for faster acceleration on NVIDIA RTX GPUs...

Stemming from a GRUB bootloader inquiry and discussion that started over one year ago, a new specification is being proposed for possible adoption by the Linux kernel in being able to pass bootloader or system firmware logs to the operating system kernel for in turn exposing them to user-space...

Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer...

The 2020 Linux App Summit just concluded as a conference focused on the Linux user-space/applications. Given the pandemic, it was a virtual conference and the video recordings are now available...

Four years ago I chronicled building a massive L-shaped desk for a better workflow, more monitors and space. For those that may be wanting to procure a new computer desk if you are working from home or eyeing L-shaped desk options, here is a new build I recently finished up as an improvement over my original design

Back during the summer LLVM developers began devising plans for a new default branch name in Git for fostering the development of the open-source compiler stack. Like a growing number of open-source software projects, they have been working to move away from Git's current default of "master" as the main development branch. Beginning next month, that should now be a reality...

It's been another busy week of bug fixing in the KDE space along with other feature work, including on the Plasma Wayland front...