Phoronix

AMD under their GPUOpen umbrella has published a paper on their new technology dubbed "GI-1.0" that is a fast, scalable two-level radiance caching scheme for real-time global illumination. This means of real-time global illumination says it can deliver comparable quality to other GI implementations while said to be much faster. GI-1.0 will be open-source, AMD says, but the code isn't yet published...

As some interesting open-source news out of Microsoft today, their open-source Windows Termina that has been in development the past few years and providing many modern features is now the default beginning with Windows 11 22H2...

MoltenVK as the portability layer for Vulkan that exposes this industry standard graphics API on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS platforms is now able to expose Vulkan 1.2 compatibility...

Git 2.38.1 was just released along with updates to older versions, including the new point releases of v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, and v2.37.4. The big set of Git updates today is due to two more security issues coming to light...

AMD, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have used this week's OCP Global Summit to announce Caliptra as their open specification for a silicon Root-of-Trust (ROT) to be found with future CPUs / SoCs, GPUs, NICs, SSDs, and other hardware components.

Last year the OpenPOWER Foundation announced LibreBMC as a POWER-based open-source BMC and now they have progressed to the point of actually demoing this BMC backed by a fully open-source software stack...

Coreboot 4.18 had been planned for release in August but after that slipped, this newest Coreboot feature release is now shipping and comes with many hardware support improvements and other changes for this open-source system firmware implementation...

Back in August I wrote about a patch to change AMD's CPU microcode loading on Linux to now patch every logical CPU thread rather than just per physical core. It turned out that at least some CPU microcode updates do make per-thread modifications while the Linux kernel microcode handling for AMD was just applying microcode updates at run-time on a per-core basis. That patch was seemingly forgotten about but has now been queued up as part of x86 "urgent" changes for the mainline kernel...

Microsoft has released its monthly update to CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution serving a variety of purposes from WSL to Azure...

Two weeks ago a bunch of old Mesa code got removed including the XvMC front-end, Rbug as a remote debugging interface, and some of Graw that was to serve as a raw Gallium3D interface without a traditional Gallium front-end. Some of Graw was accidentally left in the source tree while now that has been caught and eliminated in further lightening the size of Mesa...

Valve is preparing to roll-out Proton 7.0-5 as the newest version of this Wine-derived software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. For facilitating some testing prior to the formal Proton 7.0-5, a release candidate was published today...

Libcamera has been in development for several years now as an open-source camera support library that works across Linux, Android, and Chrome OS platforms. Due to interest from seeing tagged releases, the libcamera crew has published their first official release of this open-source camera stack...

Ahead of O3DCON kicking off tomorrow in Austin, Texas as a developer event around the Open 3D Engine game engine backed by the Linux Foundation and numerous organizations, O3DE 22.10 has been released...

VESA today announced the publishing of the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. As a pleasant change, VESA has been working behind the scenes to see that all DisplayPort 2.0 certified products are actually forward-compatible with this more strict DisplayPort 2.1 specification...

Now that Linux 6.1-rc1 was released, here is my look at all of the interesting kernel changes and new features that landed over the past two weeks. Linux 6.1 is shaping up to be another exciting kernel with many new software features, new hardware enablement work, and other changes for this end-of-year 2022 kernel version that is also likely to be the next Linux LTS release.

Firefox 106.0 web browser release builds are now available ahead of the official Firefox 106 announcement on Tuesday. Firefox 106 does have improvements to its PDF viewer as well as the WebRTC communication support...

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham who the past several years has focused on fixing many bugs and nuisances with the KDE desktop as well as being well known for his weekly "This Week In KDE" development summaries has been elected to the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. As part of the board, his platform is on fundraising more for KDE and hoping to hire more developers to further accelerate this open-source desktop environment...

After Intel posted a set of patches last week for the GNU Compiler Collection around Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake, and Sierra Forest, the two more basic patches have already been merged into the GCC 13 code-base while the Sierra Forest Xeon E-core patches and the various new instructions presented there are still undergoing review...

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative...

This should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's tendency to ship with bleeding-edge package versions, but Fedora Linux 38 next spring will offer PHP 8.2 for those wanting to run a LAMP stack on this modern, Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...