Phoronix

The Khronos Group has posted their material from the SIGGRAPH 2019 graphics conference and includes some interesting updates on Vulkan and their ongoing efforts...

NVIDIA engineers continue to be among those in the Vulkan technical sub-group working to advance machine learning for this API...

Similar to the recent upstream Linux kernel discussions over the poor Linux desktop experience when in memory pressure situations particularly with systems having limited amounts of RAM, Fedora developers are discussing ways to improve this experience as well...

Knut Omang of Oracle is working on integrating the Kernel Test Framework into the Linux kernel source tree/repository...

The Canonical team led by Alan Griffiths for maintaining the Mir display server with Wayland support today rolled out Mir version 1.4...

Being evaluated for Qt 5.14 is shipping Qt PDF that allows PDF documents to be rendered/viewed inside QWidget-based applications...

Queued now for Linux 5.3 and also marked for back-porting to existing kernel stable series is a fix to address distorted and crackling analog audio input that has affected AMD systems for at least the past two years with certain Realtek audio codecs...

At $39 to $66 USD depending upon model, the ROCK Pi 4 is evolving to offer nice open-source support down to the Arm Mali graphics thanks to the Panfrost Mesa driver and also works nicely with Wayland...

Last week was the Intel Gallium driver one line patch to boost performance by 1%. Today's code churn within Mesa for Intel's open-source Linux graphics drivers were larger but also with a more profound performance impact with some workloads now being faster by around 20%. Making this more exciting is that today's round of driver optimizations apply to the very common and mature "Gen 9" graphics hardware...

DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 is out today as the newest version of this popular BSD operating system...

AMD Mesa lead developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of improvements to the TGSI-to-NIR pass today for Mesa 19.2 to enhance the RadeonSI driver's support for using this intermediate representation...

One month ago we were told that AMD released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners for addressing the systemd boot issue with Ryzen 3000 series processors that stems from an RdRand instruction issue. Finally over the past week we've seen motherboard vendors pushing out BIOS updates for the prominent motherboards and indeed this takes care of the issue...

Gentoo's AArch64/ARM64 support for 64-bit ARM should now be in good shape...

With last week's dramatic EPYC "Rome" launch where AMD has blown past Intel Xeon "Cascadelake" performance in a majority of server benchmarks, helping the successful launch of these Zen 2 server processors has been Intel's repeated delays of 10nm/Icelake CPUs and also the Spectre / Meltdown / Zombieload / Foreshadow mitigations. Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.

We have seen Intel's compiler gurus contributing new enablement patches for Tiger Lake support with GCC 10 due out next year while now they have also landed their initial Tiger Lake support into the LLVM Clang 10 code compiler also due out in H1'2020...

It was just yesterday that Vulkan 1.1.118 was released with two new extensions while now this Monday morning Vulkan 1.1.119 was released as a third extension was accidentally left out of yesterday's weekly revision...

Sway and WLROOTS creator Drew DeVault on top of his several open-source projects has also been working on improving the VR infrastructure support on Wayland as part of contract work for Status.im. The secure communication company is looking to build a Wayland-driven VR workspace but for that the VR headset support on Wayland needs to be improved...

The GNU toolchain crew released today GCC 9.2 as the newest stable release to their compiler stack...

After more than four years in development there is finally the release of Xfce 4.14...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3 release candidate 4 as the latest weekly test release for this new kernel version...