Phoronix

While there aren't too many Windows games out there still popular and supporting AMD's Mantle graphics API that was the precursor to Vulkan, open-source developer Clément Guérin continues work on his "GRVK" initiative for mapping Mantle on top of Vulkan as a learning exercise and for allowing those still relevant Mantle-supported games to in turn run on Vulkan...

Polishing up Qt 5.15 since its May release is now Qt 5.15.1 as the first point release in this last Qt5 series ahead of Qt 6.0 later this year...

It should come as little surprise in general but making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) for multimedia encode/decode is a big deal for performance. While one could hope that by 2020 most open-source encoders were already extensively utilizing AVX(2), that isn't yet the case with the latest being AOM-AV1 picking up another optimization...

Recently carrying out some benchmarks of all major kernel releases from Linux 5.0 through Linux 5.9 ended up yielding some surprising performance changes with the in-development 5.9 kernel. Here's details on this historical look at the kernel performance and what's going on with the Linux 5.9 kernel slowdowns.

It's been widely expected AMD will launch their next-generation RDNA 2 graphics cards and Zen 3 processors in Q4 as they previously reported as well as leaks pointing to October reveal dates. Today the company is sharing actual dates for said announcements...

Systemd developers are still hoping to introduce systemd-oomd as part of the next release...

Along with Intel's SVT-AV1 0.8.5, another open-source AV1 video encoder seeing a new release this week is the Rust-written rav1e...

Wired up in Mesa 20.3-devel is a new DriConf option override_vram_size for overriding a smaller amount of video memory to report to the program/game being run. This is intended for development/debug purposes...

Chinese company Zhaoxin that continues working on x86_64 CPUs based on VIA Centaur Technology is working on supporting their "7" family processors with the Linux kernel...

Proposed last year were a set of patches aiming to improve the Intel virtual GPU "vGPU" performance in para-virtualized cases by having optimizations around the shared memory region between the guest and Intel GVTg code. With optimizing the workload PV submission and PPGTT PV updates, the glxgears performance could improve by 30~50% while for large media/3D workloads was more around a 4% average improvement...

With GNOME 3.38 due to be released next week, the GNOME Shell and Mutter development blog has put out their overview of all the improvements and new features to expect...

Google engineers today celebrating pushing the Android 11 sources to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) as part of the official Android 11 release...

For four years now since Fedora 25 the default GNOME Shell desktop environment has been using Wayland by default. Next spring with Fedora 34, the KDE Spin is finally planning a similar migration to use Wayland by default with the KDE Plasma desktop...

Intel's September 2020 security advisories were posted today and include four security advisories around nine vulnerabilities...

When looking at the performance of Zink's OpenGL over Vulkan implementation just about one year ago the performance had a lot to be desired. But since then they have patches bringing it all the way to OpenGL 4.6 compared to the OpenGL 2.1 days and there has also been a lot of work on the performance. The performance at least for select operations is now turning out better than even the developers were expecting...

With Intel Gen11 graphics and newer supporting Adaptive-Sync / Variable Refresh Rate for minimizing tearing and stuttering, their open-source developers have now added the necessary bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver for supporting the VRR functionality...

Hikari, the FreeBSD-focused Wayland compositor that also works on Linux systems, is out with a new feature release...

GStreamer 1.18 is now available for this widely-used, cross-platform multimedia framework...

The GNOME Power Profiles Daemon (power-profiles-daemon) has begun taking shape over the past few weeks for ultimately allowing better controls over system power preferences with different profiles...

Following the major Inkscape 1.0 release happening back in May for this very popular, cross-platform vector graphics program there is the first point release now available...