NVIDIA 440.66.15 Vulkan Linux Driver Offers Up More Fixes
NVIDIA has been quite aggressive recently with their new Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux with today marking another such release...
Linux 5.8 Feature Queue Has Multiple Performance Optimizations, Intel Rocket Lake, Other Hardware
If all goes well Linux 5.7 should reach stable this weekend and that in turn will mark the start of the Linux 5.8 merge window. With our monitoring of the various "-next" branches for weeks already, here is a look at some of what is on the table for this next version of the Linux kernel...
Arm Announces Cortex-A78, Cortex-X Custom
Arm today announced the Cortex-A78 as their SoC for next-generation smartphones with up to 20% sustained performance improvements. Arm also announced today the Cortex-X Custom program...
A Quick Look At GCC 10.1 PGO Optimization Benchmarks
Following the GCC 10.1 compiler optimization benchmarks posted this weekend, a number of readers were wondering about the impact of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) on the new GCC 10 compiler. Here are some preliminary data points on that front...
Qt 5.15 Released With Graphics Improvements, Preparations Ahead Of Qt 6
It's coming a few days late but The Qt Company's Lars Knoll just announced the official release of Qt 5.15.0...
Reiser5 File-System Working On New Features Like Data Tiering, Burst Buffers
Reiser5 was announced back on New Year's Eve with support for local volumes and supporting parallel scaling out and other improvements over the long-in-development but never mainlined Reiser4. While Reiser5 was not met with enthusiasm, Edward Shishkin has continued working on this next-generation file-system and today announced the latest round of improvements...
Qualcomm Adreno 650 + 640 GPUs To Be Supported By Mainline Linux 5.8 Kernel
The crew working on the MSM DRM driver from Freedreno / Google / Code Aurora (Qualcomm) have an interesting batch of changes for this open-source GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware come Linux 5.8...
Linux 5.8 Picking Up A Quirk For Being Able To Reboot The 2009 MacBook Without Hangs
With the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle a quirk is being added to be able to reboot the 2009 era Apple MacBook without needing to boot with any special flags...
Adaptive-Sync/VRR Seeing Port To xf86-video-modesetting Driver
Currently if wanting to use Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync variable refresh rate support of the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver you need to be using the xf86-video-amdgpu X.Org driver for proper handling as well, but a port of the DDX bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver is in the works...
Phoronix Test Suite 9.6.1 Released For Cross-Platform, Open-Source Benchmarking
One month after the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.6 release, Phoronix Test Suite 9.6.1 is out as the first and only planned point release to this quarter's feature series...
Two More Projects Join KWinFT Fork Of KDE KWin, Beta Milestone Reached
Announced over one month ago was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin with an emphasis on improving the Wayland support and better embracing modern technologies. A beta of KWinFT is now available...
AMD Energy Driver Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.8 For Core/Package Power Sensors
Landing this weekend in hwmon-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel cycle is the recently reported on "amd_energy" driver for supporting AMD Zen/Zen2 core and package energy sensors...
GCC's JIT Library Sees Experimental Port To Windows
For several years now GCC has offered a embeddable JIT compiler that for GPL applications can serve as a bytecode interpreter, an experimental Python compiler, and other possible use-cases with this libgccjit library. There now are patches pending for bringing libgccjit to Windows...
Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
An interesting anecdote shared in today's Linux 5.7-rc7 announcement is word that Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds switched his main rig over to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper...
Linux 5.7-rc7 Kernel Released With It Looking To Be In Good Shape
While last week's Linux 5.7-rc6 kernel was quite big, Linux 5.7-rc7 is out today and it's on the smaller side of things in reassuring Linus Torvalds that the stable release of this kernel can happen soon...
Linux Work Culminating On A "READFILE" Syscall For Reading Small Files Efficiently
Stemming from recent kernel discussions over a hypothetical new system call for reading small files more efficiently, Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on the readfile() system call and it's looking like it is taking shape well enough to premiere soon in a new mainline kernel release...
AMD Sensor Fusion Hub Support Is Not Coming With Linux 5.8
For those AMD Ryzen laptop users eager to see the Sensor Fusion Hub driver for supporting the different hardware sensors on these AMD Zen laptops, that driver still isn't going to be merged for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle even after the patches were first published months ago...
Intel Engineer Proposes Software-Based KVM Protected Memory Extension
While modern AMD EPYC CPUs support Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel more recently has been working on MKTME for similarly offering hardware-backed total memory encryption, an Intel open-source engineer has now proposed a software-based solution for protected memory support for KVM virtualization...
Ardour 6.0 Digital Audio Workstation Released
Ardour 6.0 is now available as the latest major release of this high-end yet open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) package that runs across all major platforms...
NVIDIA Nsight Graphics 2020.3 Supports Profiling KHR Ray-Tracing
NVIDIA on Friday released Nsight Graphics 2020.3 as the newest version of their proprietary tool for profiling and debugging Direct3D / Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenVR software...