Phoronix

The Microsoft Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa that allows for the Vulkan API to be implemented atop Direct3D 12 for benefit on Windows now has a working pipeline cache implementation...

LLVM release manager Tom Stellard of Red Hat has laid out the planned LLVM/Clang 15.0 release schedule for this next major version of this open-source compiler stack...

Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux...

After what has felt like years of neglect and little progress in advancing this open-source mail/communications client, Thunderbird 102 is out today with some shiny new features and a lot of UI refinements...

AMD's GPUOpen team quietly setup a new GitHub repository for "gpurt", presumably a new ray-tracing related software effort...

Arm today announced their second-generation Armv9 CPU designs with the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715. Arm also refreshed the Cortex-A510 to allow for more cores and a power reduction...

Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance...

In addition to announcing the GeForce GTX 1630 budget card today (expect our Linux review soon), NVIDIA published 515.57 as their newest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a fresh batch of features for the next Fedora Linux distribution release...

For those not yet on the GCC 11 or GCC 12 stable series, GCC 10.4 is out today as the latest in that older stable series...

With last week seeing AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 released as an update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver and it noting performance improvements, it was time for some fresh benchmarks of that driver up against Mesa's alternative "RADV" Vulkan driver. Here are some fresh benchmarks with an AMD RDNA2 GPU for seeing how RADV continues competing -- and usually outperforming -- AMD's own official open-source driver.

A "sched/fair" scheduler change queued this morning into TIP's sched/core for Linux 5.20 aims to enhance the efficiency when searching for an idle CPU under heavy system load. The change led by Intel should improve the kernel's efficiency when the system is overloaded but as with most low-level tuning does run the risk of regressions...

A decade after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver effort for reverse-engineering Arm Mali graphics, developers continue occasionally working on improvements to this Gallium3D driver for older generations of Mali hardware. The most recent feature work is finally enabling 4x MSAA support...

Last month for their Vision conference, Intel announced the Habana Labs Gaudi2 accelerator. Gaudi2 is the second-generation offering from Intel-owned Habana Labs for training and inference. The open-source Linux kernel driver support for Gaudi2 is now getting underway along with accompanying open-source user-space software stack support...

Git 2.37 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, distributed revision control system...

The Rust-GCC front-end that allows Rust code to be compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) could possibly be upstreamed for next year's GCC 13 compiler release but not necessarily complete at that stage. In any case, it's good seeing progress on Rust-GCC as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...

Merged today to Mesa 22.2 was a four month old merge request for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" that significantly improves the 16-bit FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) performance...

One of Intel's many wonderful open-source projects for creators is OSPRay Studio that is their interactive visualization and ray-tracing application built atop their OSPRay portable ray-tracing engine. OSPRay Studio has been making steady progress since its 2020 debut and out today is their newest update...

The Firefox 102.0 release is now available for download ahead of its stable release announcement tomorrow...

Coming about last week was a Fedora 37 change proposal to improve the profiling and debugging of Fedora packages but with possible performance costs. That suggested change is about adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when building packages so the frame pointer is always available for improving the debugging/profiling of the stock Fedora packages. Unfortunately, it can come with significant performance costs as these benchmarks show.