Phoronix

New releases of the xf86-video-trident and xf86-video-s3virge X.Org drivers are now available for those still rocking out to old Trident and S3 graphics hardware...

Google engineers last week released libvpx 1.13 as the newest feature release to this library that serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 codecs. While Google engineers have already spent years tuning libvpx for maximum performance with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), the game is not over and v1.13 has yet more tuning there -- along with continued Arm Neon optimizations too...

Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors...

For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users...

Arthur Cohen with Embecosm presented at the FOSDEM developer conference earlier this month on gccrs, the ongoing effort to provide a Rust language front-end to the GCC compiler. While the GCC Rust front-end has been merged for the upcoming GCC 13 release, it's not yet in a state that will really be usable to most Rust developers yet as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing...

It's been a while since there has been any major additions to Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL implementation led by Red Hat's Karol Herbst while today he merged support for SPIR-V programs to this Rust-written driver. This SPIR-V support is necessary for eventually supporting SYCL and HIP...

While initial Rust code was merged for Linux 6.1, it's not yet used by any kernel drivers or functionality for end-users and the integration and other abstractions for Rust are still being established. With the upcoming Linux 6.3 cycle, more of that Rust groundwork is set to be merged and nearing the point of Rust-written kernel modules/drivers will be able to be upstreamed...

While there is a lot to love about RISC-V, with the plethora of RISC-V extensions some of the acronyms are hard to digest. The latest example is the Linux kernel patches for "zisslpcfi", which is the RISC-V extension around Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for RISC-V processors...

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...