Phoronix

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" LBVH support has landed for boosting the Vulkan ray-tracing potential for this open-source driver. The LBVH patch series is what I reported on earlier this month for at least one workload going from around 13 to 250 FPS boost...

In addition to Ubuntu 22.04 switching back NVIDIA to using X11 by default rather than Wayland as a launch-day change, separately, there was another rather notable last minute change affecting 3D support for virtual machines... Those with Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and launching Ubuntu 22.04 desktop VMs will find 3D acceleration disabled by default...

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has merged support for the JPEG-XL image format...

AMD's open-source Linux engineers on the CPU side of the house continue being quite busy with all sorts of new feature enablement work, which given their timing and other factors is almost all definitively for upcoming Zen 4. AMD this week sent out updated patches in getting "PerfMonV2" support in order that is updated performance monitoring abilities with upcoming processors...

In addition to CUPS back to seeing new feature development for this print server now being managed by OpenPrinting, CUPS founder Michael Sweet also continues being quite busy with working on PAPPL as his modern printer application framework effort...

While back in March Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" changed the default behavior for NVIDIA's driver to use Wayland inline with Intel and Radeon graphics having used the GNOME Wayland session rather than X.Org for the past few releases, this change was reverted at the last-minute. With a launch-day SRU, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is defaulting to using the GNOME X.Org session rather than Wayland when running the proprietary NVIDIA driver...

Being sent in as a fix for Linux 5.18-rc3 is supporting various marine navigation keycodes with at least Garmin's boat steering wheels and marine navigation displays running Linux...

Another week, another batch of new AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature work ready for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the next kernel cycle. Feature code continues building up in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.19 cycle...

Even amid all the April software releases, KDE developers remain very busy working on their open-source desktop stack...

Wine 7.7 is out as the latest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux...

Mesa's Rusticl is a yet-to-be-merged OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers written in the Rust programming language. The latest code now can pass the Khronos OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Test Suite!..

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!..

Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media has done on a terrific job on the development of SVT-AV1 for open-source, high performance CPU-based AV1 video encoding. This morning marks the release of SVT-AV1 1.0...

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows...

Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year...

Back in February was the interesting work laid out by Red Hat engineers for their looking at using eBPF within the kernel's HID subsystem. A new patch series attempting this innovative use of the in-kernel JIT virtual machine has been published...

While the Mesa 22.1 feature release will hopefully be out in about two weeks, out today is Mesa 22.0.2 as the newest point release for the current Mesa stable series. With this release slipping an extra week, there are even more bug-fixes than usual back-ported into this version...

NVIDIA by way of their GPU compute / CUDA Fortran interests and having acquired the PGI compiler company nearly a decade ago has been active contributors to the LLVM Fortran scene. NVIDIA spearheaded the work on the modern LLVM Fortran compiler support and worked with other vendors and the open-source ecosystem on the since-upstreamed FLANG compiler. NVIDIA had been maintaining a "fir-dev" downstream for their latest Fortran compiler patches while now moving forward they will be focused on upstream LLVM contributions...

Proton 7.0-2 is out today as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux / SteamOS...