Phoronix

The latest Blender Eevee and Viewport module meeting minutes have just been posted and outline the latest thinking around Vulkan API support from the perspective of these modules...

KiCad 7.0 was released this weekend as a "significant upgrade" to this open-source EDA (Electronics Design Automation) suite that can be used for designing PCB layouts, circuit design schematics of varying complexity, and more...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.2-rc8 ahead of the planned Linux 6.2 stable release next Sunday, 19 February...

Microsoft on Friday released version 1.14 of their ONNX Runtime, a cross-platform, high performance machine learning inferencing and training accelerator...

Back in 2018 the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) was hosted in A Coruña, Spain by Igalia developers and for XDC2023 it's again returning...

A ten month old merge request to GNOME's Mutter for adding implicit grabbing to the Clutter code was finally merged last week...

HarfBuzz 7.0 is out as a new version of this open-source text shaping library used by software like GNOME, KDE, Chrome OS, Java, Chrome, LibreOffice, and others...

Lutris 0.5.13 Beta is out this weekend as the newest test release for this open-source game manager that makes it easier to install and play video games from multiple game stores, emulators, and integration with other services...

Several years ago the open-source "Hangover" project started as allowing Windows x86_64 and x86 programs to run on 64-bit ARM Linux by leveraging the upstream Wine software as well as QEMU. Hangover also saw work for allowing Windows programs to run on POWER9 Linux hardware and other architectures. The Hangover project has been on hiatus but is now back to being revived...

The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder...

There is already some AVX-512 optimizations for software contained within the FFmpeg multimedia library, but there is room for greater AVX-512 usage especially now with AMD supporting this Advanced Vector Extensions expansion and the latest Intel Xeon CPUs having little associated cost now with AVX-512 use...

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of the XMMS audio player from two decades ago. For those that enjoyed XMMS back in the day, Audacious continues being updated as a modern fork of XMMS...

KDE developers and users are very excited for Plasma 5.27 that will be making its stable debut next week and also serves as the last major release of the Plasma 5 series...

Being worked on actively by a number of stakeholders in recent years has been Flang as a Fortran language front-end to the LLVM compiler stack. While not yet ready for general use, Flang has been making strides as well as showing some promising performance results...

NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest...

Systemd 253 is gearing up for release while out today is the third and possibly final release candidate...

An Intel engineer has implemented compute-based transcoding support to the DXT5 texture format as part of S3TC texture compression. This new path yields a 56% decrease in upload time for a texture upload micro-benchmark when tested on an Intel Ice Lake system with the Iris Gallium3D driver...

This week Intel released Embree 4.0 as the newest version of their open-source, high performance ray-tracing library. While the headline feature is now having support for GPU acceleration with SYCL to take advantage of Arc Graphics and other GPU hardware with SYCL support, for those that have long been using Embree on CPUs its performance has also improved. Here are some initial CPU-based benchmarks I did this week on Embree 4.0 with Intel's new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors.

Apple introduced the Touch Bar to their MacBook Pro laptops a half-decade ago as a dynamic touchscreen to replace the function keys on the keyboard. While some MacBook Pro models have already dropped the Touch Bar for not catching on, some community developers in the open-source Linux community continue work on enabling the functionality for the upstream Linux kernel...

After being in development for nearly one year , Zstd 1.5.4 has been released with many "significant performance improvements across multiple scenarios" for this increasingly-used data compression algorithm...