Etnaviv Gallium3D Picks Up A NIR Compiler
Landing on Tuesday ahead of this week's Mesa 19.2 feature freeze is an experimental NIR compiler for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL driver support for Vivante graphics IP...
CVE-2019-1125 "SWAPGS" Is The Newest Spectre Vulnerability
CVE-2019-1125 was made public today or also referred to as the "SWAPGS" vulnerability as a new variant of Spectre V1 affecting Windows and Linux with Intel (and according to mixed information, AMD - though the current Linux kernel patches at least seem to only apply to Intel) x86_64 processors...
Yes, Linux Does Bad In Low RAM / Memory Pressure Situations On The Desktop
It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week...
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 Brings Cloud Improvements, Kernel Livepatching
For those making use of RHEL7 and not planning to shift to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 anytime soon, RHEL 7.7 is now officially available...
Intel's Iris Gallium3D Driver Gets A 1 Line Patch To Bump The Performance By ~1%
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver as their new OpenGL Linux driver aiming to be the default Mesa driver by year's end continues seeing more performance optimizations now that the fundamentals are in place. The latest optimization is a one line tweak yielding around one percent higher performance across the board...
KDevelop 5.4 Released With Meson Support, Scratchpad Plug-In
Version 5.4 of KDE's KDevelop integrated development environment is now available...
FFmpeg 4.2 Released With AV1 Decoding Support, GIF Parser
There hasn't been a new FFmpeg release since last November but that finally changed with FFmpeg 4.2 "Ada" being issued today as the newest major release for this multimedia open-source project...
GNOME 3.34 Beta Released - Now Under UI/Feature/API/ABI Freezes
The GNOME 3.34 beta (v3.33.90) release is now available one day early and also marks the point at which the feature freeze is in effect along with the user-interface changes and no API/ABI breakage...
Intel Xeon Cooper Lake To Offer Up To 56 Cores Per Socket Next Year
Intel decided today to reveal a few new details about their Xeon "Cooper Lake" processors due out in H1'2020...
Google Engineers Get Windows Booting When Kexec'ed Under Linux
An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux...
AMD Posts A New Slide Deck Outlining The RDNA Architecture
Last week AMD published their RDNA instruction set architecture documentation. That's a bit heavy reading unless you are a driver developer or low-level engine developer, but for those wanting a bit of a higher-level look at AMD's new RDNA graphics architecture, today they uploaded a new slide deck...
Microsoft Works On Adding More Bling To The Windows Terminal
Since Microsoft's first preview release of Windows Terminal earlier this summer it's been entertaining to watch its evolution with the Redmond giant trying to make a first-rate terminal emulator for Windows and one that can appease veteran Linux users...
Valve's ACO Compiler, Zink, FreeSync & Other Topics To Be Talked About At XDC 2019
We're less than two months out until the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) and the featured presentations for this three-day event have now been announced...
GNOME 3.34 Now Supports Starting XWayland On-Demand
One of the long-time work-in-progress patch series has been realized in time for next month's GNOME 3.34 release... Mutter when acting as a Wayland compositor will allow starting XWayland on-demand, or rather only running it when needed to handle an X11 client/application...
DXVK 1.3.2 Released With Fixes/Improvements For The Division, World of Warcraft & More
While a new Proton 4.11 release came out last week as a big Valve update that included pulling in DXVK 1.3, Philip Rebohle who leads work on this Direct3D-over-Vulkan layer today released DXVK 1.3.2 as the latest update for improving the Windows/Direct3D on Linux gaming experience...
GlusterFS Planning To Drop 32-Bit Support
The GlusterFS network attached storage file-system developed by Red Hat with a focus on cloud computing is the latest open-source project eyeing the removal of 32-bit (i686) software support...
Another Look At The Maturing AMD Radeon RX 5700 Series Linux Performance
With the AMD Radeon RX 5700 / RX 5700 XT Linux driver support maturing and the early optimizations/fixes and lingering feature work now calming down for the Linux 5.3 kernel and within RadeonSI/RADV for the imminent branching of Mesa 19.2, here is another look at how the Navi performance stands today compared to AMD Vega graphics cards and the high-end NVIDIA Pascal and Turing graphics cards.
GCC 9.2 Available For Testing With Tuned AMD Zen 2 Support Back-Ported
The GNU Compiler Collection 9.2 release should be out next Monday while until then a release candidate was issued today for testing...
Another GNOME Improvement Being Discussed To Help With Touchpad Scrolling / Tablets
Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt had another busy week continuing to focus on upstream GNOME performance improvements...
Haiku Developers Begin Optimizing Their BeOS-Inspired OS For Performance
With the long-awaited Haiku R1 beta having happened at the end of last year and other modern features/support getting squared away, the developers behind this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system have begun investigating their OS performance and making necessary performance optimizations...