Phoronix

Last week saw Intel sending out new GCC compiler patches for adding the "Sierra Forest" CPU target and the number of new x86_64 instructions it's adding. Those GCC patches follow Intel publishing an updated programming reference manual where they detailed these new instructions coming for Sierra Forest Xeon CPUs as well as Grand Ridge. Now on the LLVM compiler side, they too have begun landing new patches for these new Intel instructions...

Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 work on Linux if you are running the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa. The gaming experience is decent aside from occasional driver issues. One of the games that has been pesky with the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver has been the HITMAN 3 title running under Steam Play but with the newest Mesa 22.3 code should now be fixed up...

Mold as the open-source high performance linker continues its ascent in working to prove itself as a viable alternative to LLVM's LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.6 is out today with the latest fixes and features...

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a modern Rust-based OpenCL implementation for open-source Gallium3D drivers has shown it's capable of outperforming AMD's open-source ROCm compute stack for at least some GPUs and workloads...

The USB Implementers Forum on Tuesday announced the USB4 v2.0 specification that allows USB transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps over USB Type-C connections...

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.