Phoronix

Last year I signed up for SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service with hopes of using it to replace the Internet connection used for running Phoronix. After months of using Starlink and carrying out thousands of benchmarks, Starlink in the US midwest / Chicagoland area has proven reliable but the performance can be rather volatile still and it was frustrating at first waiting for some Starlink accessories to ship, but the self-service nature and simplicity of the setup were great.

Back in March there were Linux kernel patches posted for review to boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii U game console after this Linux porting work has long been done out-of-tree. A new iteration of those Wii U enablement patches for the Linux kernel have now been posted...

Wine developers have released VKD3D 1.4, the newest version of their Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is useful with Wine for enjoying newer Windows games on Linux...

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it...

The open-source Mesa "R600" Gallium3D driver for supporting AMD graphics processors prior to the Radeon HD 7000 series, a rewritten NIR back-end has been published that enables better performance and proper FP64 usage...

With the AMD Radeon "HIP" acceleration in Blender 3.2 with the Cycles back-end, an unfortunate early limitation is that this is limited to just AMD RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) graphics processors while prior generation RDNA1 GPUs have issues with some textures like those used in the benchmarks. This week though AMD did post a new patch for Blender enabling HIP support on Windows and Linux for Vega/GFX9 graphics...

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made...

Merged yesterday into Linux 5.19 as a post merge window change is making the kernel's signature verification code FIPS compliant...

AMD today released a new update to AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources while plumbed to use the open-source LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. For Linux gamers this driver doesn't remain as popular as Mesa's RADV but the update today does deliver on some game performance optimizations...

Google today released Chrome 103 as the newest monthly feature update to its cross-platform web browser...

The PCI SIG today announced the PCI Express 7.0 specification that doubles the data rate to 128 GT/s and should be released to members in 2025...

To complement the AMD HIP, NVIDIA CUDA, and NVIDIA OptiX acceleration in Blender 3.2, Intel engineers are still hoping to have their Intel oneAPI SYCL support ready to premiere in Blender 3.3 for Intel GPU-based Cycles acceleration with Intel integrated and discrete graphics processors...

It's been known for a while that The Khronos Group and its Vulkan working group has been working on a cross-vendor extension for mesh shaders akin to what is offered already by Direct3D 12 and with NVIDIA by their VK_NV_mesh_shader extension. A few more details about the forthcoming Vulkan mesh shader support were detailed today...

Speaking this morning at The Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit, Linus Torvalds talked up the possibilities of Rust within the Linux kernel and that it could be landing quite soon -- possibly even for the next kernel cycle...

Last week Feral Interactive released Total War: WARHAMMER III for Linux as a native port of this game that debuted earlier this year on Windows. This latest Total War game port to Linux by Feral relies on the Vulkan API for graphics and comes with a modest system requirements. For those curious about the performance of this latest high profile game port, here are benchmarks across 24 different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux.

RISC-V International announced their first batch of new specifications for 2022. This includes approving of Efficient Trace for RISC-V (E-Trace), RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI), RISC-V UEFI, and RISC-V Zmmul multiply-only extensions...

At the Embedded World conference happening this week in Nürnberg, Think Silicon is showing off the first production RISC-V 3D GPU design...

AMD is using the Embedded World conference in Nürnberg to launch the Ryzen Embedded R2000 series for industrial use-cases along with IoT, thin clients, and edge computing...

Meta (Facebook) engineers on Monday announced CIR, a proposed new intermediate representation (IR) for LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end that is based on the MLIR representation...

Earlier this month the TI Sitara AM62 series SoCs were announced for low-power IoT, AI, and other use-cases. While being powered by uninteresting Arm Cortex-A53 cores, with the AM625 SoC part of this new Sitara line-up there is an Imagination PowerVR GPU and that is now being enabled by the new open-source Vulkan driver...