AMD sent in their initial pull request of feature changes to their AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver to begin queuing in DRM-Next for September's kick off the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle. Notable to this batch of AMDGPU DRM-Next work is a lot of new unreleased GPU support...
Landing on Tuesday ahead of this week's Mesa 19.2 feature freeze is an experimental NIR compiler for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL driver support for Vivante graphics IP...
CVE-2019-1125 was made public today or also referred to as the "SWAPGS" vulnerability as a new variant of Spectre V1 affecting Windows and Linux with Intel (and according to mixed information, AMD - though the current Linux kernel patches at least seem to only apply to Intel) x86_64 processors...
It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week...
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver as their new OpenGL Linux driver aiming to be the default Mesa driver by year's end continues seeing more performance optimizations now that the fundamentals are in place. The latest optimization is a one line tweak yielding around one percent higher performance across the board...
There hasn't been a new FFmpeg release since last November but that finally changed with FFmpeg 4.2 "Ada" being issued today as the newest major release for this multimedia open-source project...
The GNOME 3.34 beta (v3.33.90) release is now available one day early and also marks the point at which the feature freeze is in effect along with the user-interface changes and no API/ABI breakage...
An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux...
Last week AMD published their RDNA instruction set architecture documentation. That's a bit heavy reading unless you are a driver developer or low-level engine developer, but for those wanting a bit of a higher-level look at AMD's new RDNA graphics architecture, today they uploaded a new slide deck...
Since Microsoft's first preview release of Windows Terminal earlier this summer it's been entertaining to watch its evolution with the Redmond giant trying to make a first-rate terminal emulator for Windows and one that can appease veteran Linux users...
We're less than two months out until the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) and the featured presentations for this three-day event have now been announced...
One of the long-time work-in-progress patch series has been realized in time for next month's GNOME 3.34 release... Mutter when acting as a Wayland compositor will allow starting XWayland on-demand, or rather only running it when needed to handle an X11 client/application...
While a new Proton 4.11 release came out last week as a big Valve update that included pulling in DXVK 1.3, Philip Rebohle who leads work on this Direct3D-over-Vulkan layer today released DXVK 1.3.2 as the latest update for improving the Windows/Direct3D on Linux gaming experience...
The GlusterFS network attached storage file-system developed by Red Hat with a focus on cloud computing is the latest open-source project eyeing the removal of 32-bit (i686) software support...
With the AMD Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux driver support maturing and the early optimizations/fixes and lingering feature work now calming down for the Linux 5.3 kernel and within RadeonSI/RADV for the imminent branching of Mesa 19.2, here is another look at how the Navi performance stands today compared to AMD Vega graphics cards and the high-end NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards.
With the long-awaited Haiku R1 beta having happened at the end of last year and other modern features/support getting squared away, the developers behind this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system have begun investigating their OS performance and making necessary performance optimizations...
Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.3-rc3 on Sunday night and it was to his surprise that it was even smaller than the previous week's release candidate...
IWD is the multi-year effort by Intel's open-source group to create a new Linux wireless daemon that could potentially replace WPA-Supplicant. IWD 0.19 is the new release available that arrived at the end of the weekend and carrying new features...
If all goes well Mesa 19.1.4 will be released on Tuesday as the newest stable point release to this collection of OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Mesa 19.1.4 is bringing around four dozen patches that accumulated over the later half of July and it's particularly heavy on Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...
Debian's annual developer conference, DebConf, wrapped up last week in Curitiba, Brasil. The slide decks and video recordings for many of those presentations are now available...
Currently when passing "-flto" for enabling Link-Time Optimizations with the GCC compiler, it defaults to using a single core/thread for carrying out the optimizations and code generation. There has been support for specifying a number of threads to use for carrying out this link-time work in parallel while finally in GCC 10 that is being enabled by default...
Monado as an open-source implementation of the Khronos OpenXR standard for AR/VR devices continues taking form though isn't quite ready yet for end-users...
Intel's modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver has exposed GLSL 4.60 compatibility (the shading language requirements for OpenGL 4.6) but when creating an OpenGL compatibility context it's been at 1.40 for the old OpenGL 3.1 requirements. Fortunately, the compatibility mode now too exposes 4.60 support...
There is one month to go until KDE's annual Akademy developer conference in Milan while open-source contributors to this desktop environment remain hard at work over the summer on making various improvements...
Shared one month ago was the initial work done on implementing a Vulkan renderer for Godot, the increasingly-used open-source cross-platform game engine. That Godot Vulkan support continues maturing along with other features that will form the basis of Godot 4.0...
One of the many interesting Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year has been to improve the Wine support on NetBSD. Thanks to student developer Naveen Narayanan, that is becoming a reality...
Merged for the GCC 9 compiler release that launched earlier this year was the preliminary AMD Radeon "GCN" GPU compiler back-end. In that initial release it wasn't particularly useful as the GPU offloading bits for the popular programming APIs/models wasn't supported so for now could just run some basic single-threaded programs. But now those interesting GPU offloading bits are pending for GCC 10...
Earlier this week the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" added support for Wave32 with compute shaders on the new Navi graphics processors. That RADV Wave32 support has now been extended for more shader types...
Hot on the heels of the upstream Wine 4.13 release following a long summer retreat, Wine-Staging 4.13 is now available with the latest testing/experimental patches re-based atop the newest Wine code...
Intel's NEO OpenCL run-time stack has been living by the "release early, release often" mantra with continuing to see frequent new updates for this OpenCL stack...
In addition to the Intel DRM driver landing lots of feature code into DRM-Next for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle coming up in September, the DRM-Misc-Next crew for collecting core infrastructure changes and work to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers has also been seeing new 5.4 work...
Wine 4.12 was released back on 5 July while finally today has been succeeded by Wine 4.13, which is normally seeing updates on a two-week release cycle...
Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain...
In addition to GNOME's involvement and stewarding of the Outreachy program (back to the days when it was known as GNOME's "Outreach Program for Women"), they have just launched an Inclusion and Diversity Team to help the desktop environment community become more inclusive...
While this year's GCC 9 compiler release brought initial support for AMD Zen 2 processors with the Znver2 target, the support was sadly incomplete. While the GCC 9 support added some of the new instructions, it wasn't complete (such as RDPRU support remains missing) and the cost tables and scheduler model were not updated from Znver1 to account for the microarchitectural changes. Thankfully, SUSE's compiler experts recently fixed up this support for the GCC 10 compiler and more recently were able to get it back-ported for the upcoming GCC 9.2 for the Linux distributions that will upgrade to that point release. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of that updated AMD Zen 2 compiler code.
Intel's open-source driver team has sent in their initial batch of kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next for material that will be targeting the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year...
With this week's release of the Chrome 76 web browser, here are some fresh benchmarks of that latest Google web browser release compared to Firefox 68 on Ubuntu Linux...
Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" is now officially available in its Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors while continuing to be powered off the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base...
While GCC and Clang are now competing neck-and-neck on Linux x86_64 when it comes to the performance of generated binaries, when it comes to each of their initiatives to transition to Git it looks like LLVM will take the cake...
Phoronix