Phoronix

Blender 3.3 is set to be released today and one of the exciting enhancements with this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software update is initial support for Intel oneAPI/SYCL GPU acceleration. Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs can now enjoy this accelerated Cycles back-end, permitting your driver stack is new enough on Windows or Linux and are using their new dGPUs and not existing integrated graphics. But this is just the start of their oneAPI GPU-accelerated push for Blender...

Since Apple introduced the M1 two years ago as their in-house Apple Silicon for laptops and desktops with a powerful AArch64 processor and custom-designed graphics processor, there has been much speculation about whether the Apple M1 (and now M2) graphics are a clean-sheet Apple design or derived from Imagination PowerVR graphics that Apple had been using with earlier SoCs. There has been some similarities brought up before with the Asahi Linux team working on enabling the Apple M1/M2 under Linux while the latest Mesa driver activity points to more common bits between PowerVR graphics hardware and the Apple AGX graphics...

Formed back in 2019 by Intel, Mozilla, and Red Hat was the Bytecode Alliance to promote running WebAssembly (WASM) everywhere. As part of the Bytecode Alliance initiatives they have been developing Wasmtime as a WebAssembly run-time and later this month they plan to christen version 1.0...

Following a slight release delay, yesterday saw the release of NetBeans 15 by the Apache Software Foundation as this Java-focused integrated deevelopment environment that also supports C/C++, PHP, JavaScript, and other languages...

While Intel Arc Graphics is already running on the open-source Linux driver stack, Intel engineers continue improving upon and refining that DG2/Alchemist graphics card support. Overnight some fresh workarounds were merged into Mesa 22.3-devel as the latest Linux driver improvements for Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics cards...

Back in July I called attention to the issue how Linux 5.19 was set to break Alder Lake P graphics support unless moving to new graphics micro-controller "GuC" firmware in tandem. That user-space breakage is frowned upon and following that article the upstream DRM kernel maintainers outlined explicit requirements around firmware not breaking driver support. Intel engineers ended up submitting a quick fix for Linux 5.19 to still support the existing firmware while now a more adequate solution has been devised...

With Fedora 39 next spring it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux...

Following the July disclosure of the Retbleed CPU security vulnerability affecting older processors and an AMD change made in August, here is a fresh look at the performance impact of the Retbleed mitigations on Linux, including if opting for the IBPB-based Retbleed mitigation, and the accumulated CPU security mitigation impact for Zen 2 with the flagship Ryzen 9 3950X processor.

GNU founder Richard Stallman has recently been working on crafting a GNU C Language introduction and reference manual...

LLVM 15 is now ready to roll as a big half-year update to this open-source compiler stack. LLVM 15.0, Clang 15.0, and other sub-projects have a lot to show for their summer 2022 accomplishments...

DRM-Misc manager Maarten Lankhorst with Intel's open-source graphics engineering team has submitted the latest weekly pull of new feature code to queue in DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 6.1 merge window...

Last month saw the Cemu project go open-source and introduce Linux support with Cemu 2.0 for this Nintendo Wii U emulator that has been in development for years. Cemu 2.0-1 is now available with Linux improvements...

OpenWrt as the embedded Linux distribution designed to run on wireless routers and other networking devices is out with its 22.03 stable release...

Mesa recently landed BPTC software fallback handling that is a requirement for OpenGL 4.2 support but BPTC is not natively supported by all GPU hardware, particularly on the embedded side. That software emulation support for BPTC is similar to what already has existed within Mesa for the ASTC and ETC formats too. A merge request is pending that also adds S3TC software fallback handling, which helps out some of the smaller, embedded GPU drivers too for getting more games running that are dependent on S3 Texture Compression...

After a series of alpha and beta releases over the past several months, out this past week is the first release candidate of the upcoming PHP 8.2...

Being merged a few minutes ago into Mesa 22.3 is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently ratified mesh shader extension...

While there has been talk and plans for Vulkan API support within Blender, currently there are no active developers working on it and much work remains before it would be ready for end-users...

A new patch floated by a Google Chrome OS / Linux kernel engineer would enable support for the Intel-led Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) by default as part of the standard kernel configuration for this security feature...

Originally carried as a patch against Ubuntu 22.04 for its GNOME 42 desktop and continued to be maintained against GNOME 43 for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 is supporting dynamic triple buffering with the Mutter compositor. This has allowed Ubuntu's GNOME desktop environment to perform better for some systems albeit not upstream in GNOME...

Following the OpenMandriva Lx ROME Technical Preview release from earlier this summer, a "silver candidate" for OpenMandriva Lx 5.0 ROME is now available for testing...