Microsoft Preparing For Their First Vulkan Extension
While the Vulkan high performance graphics and compute API is backed by many vendors, Microsoft and Apple are two notable organizations that haven't backed this Khronos Group standard. For Microsoft's part, they obviously prefer their in-house Direct3D. However, Microsoft is making preparations for submitting their first Vulkan extension...
AMD Has A One-Liner To Help Speed Up Linux System Resume Time
AMD engineers have been working out many quirks and oddities in system suspend/resume handling to make it more reliable on their hardware particularly around Ryzen laptops. In addition to suspend/resume reliability improvements and suspend-to-idle (s2idle) enhancements, one of their engineers also discovered an easy one-liner as a small step to speeding up system resume time...
Virtual ALSA Driver Posted To Help With Linux Testing/Fuzzing
Ivan Orlov this past week posted the patches for VALSA, the Virtual ALSA sound driver that aims to help Linux kernel developers in testing and fuzzing of the sound subsystem...
VKD3D-Proton 2.9 Released With Performance Improvements
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux team has just released VKD3D-Proton 2.9 as the latest major update to this Direct3D 12 on Vulkan API implementation that is used by Steam Play (Proton) for running modern Windows games on Linux...
CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust
CodeWeavers, the company known for its CrossOver software for running Windows games/apps on Linux / macOS / Chrome OS and in turn being the main corporate backer to the Wine project, is now transitioned to being an employee ownership trust. This comes with Jeremy White deciding to leave the company after 27 years...
NVIDIA R530 vs. AMD Linux 6.3 + Mesa 23.2-dev Gaming Performance
Due to the constantly evolving state of the open-source Linux graphics drivers in particular, here is a fresh look at an assortment of AMD Radeon GPUs making use of the Mesa 23.2 development code for the newest RadeonSI and RADV drivers paired with the recently released Linux 6.3 kernel. These open-source Radeon Linux gaming benchmark results are going up against various NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series graphics cards using the NVIDIA 530.41.09 release as its latest Linux driver.
Mesa "Terakan" Driver Aims To Provide Vulkan Support For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series
There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors...
Fedora To Further Evaluate vm.max_map_count Tuning For Better Linux Gaming Experience
There's been a Fedora 39 proposal under evaluation for boosting the kernel's vm.max_map_count to help with some Windows games on Steam Play. Though concerns were raised that bumping this kernel tunable too high may not be wise. As such, further testing is to happen for tuning Fedora's stock vm.max_map_count value...
Big Patch Series Prepares The Linux Audio Drivers For MIDI 2.0
Nearly forty years after the MIDI digital music protocol was first introduced, in 2020 the MIDI 2.0 protocol was announced as a major overhaul for this widely used standard by musical devices. A big patch series sent out today prepares the Linux kernel sound drivers for MIDI 2.0...
Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Adds H.265 Video Decoding Support
Intel's open-source Mesa Vulkan Video driver "ANV" has added support for H.265 (HEVC) video decoding...
Bug Bounty Programs May Sound Great, But Aren't Always Handled Well
Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn't always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability...
Ampere Computing Announces AmpereOne With Up to 192 Cores Per Socket
Ampere Computing announced this morning that their AmpereOne family of processors have entered production and provided additional details on these in-house designed Arm server processors.
sdl12-compat Gets More Games Working For This SDL1-On-SDL2 Compatibility Layer
The sdl12-compat project that implements the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for better game compatibility on modern Linux systems is out today with a new pre-release...
NVIDIA Announces The GeForce RTX 4060 Series
NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 4060 series consisting of the $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB while in July an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB version will come along with a $299 RTX 4060...
The Progress With KDE Plasma 6's KWin HDR Support
Following last month's Red Hat hosted HDR hackfest that brought together many Linux desktop stakeholders from GPU driver developers to desktop environment developers, KDE developer Xaver Hugl has shared an update on the progress being made for high dynamic range (HDR) display support from the KWin side...
New Maintainer Steps Up For GCC Compiler's MIPS CPU Port
With development of the MIPS architecture having officially ended two years ago in favor of focusing on RISC-V for future CPU designs and the overall decline of that CPU architecture, it's been years since the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has seen its MIPS code well maintained. However, now a capable developer has stepped up willing to serve as the GCC maintainer for MIPS...
AlmaLinux 8.8 Released For Those Relying On RHEL8
Earlier this month Red Hat released RHEL 9.2 and at the same time they also released RHEL 8.8 for those continuing to rely on the stable RHEL8 series. AlmaLinux managed to provide a same-day release of AlmaLinux 9.2 while now one week later they have also shipped AlmaLinux 8.8...
Steam Client Beta Fixes NVIDIA HiDPI Scaling, GPU Hardware Acceleration
Valve released a new Steam client beta overnight and contains a few notable fixes for NVIDIA Linux gamers...
Wayland's Weston 12.0 Released With Multi-GPU Support, PipeWire Backend, Tearing Control
Weston 12.0 as Wayland's reference compositor is now available with multiple GPU support in the DRM back-end, support for HDMI content types, support for the Wayland tearing control protocol, plane alpha DRM property handling, a PipeWire back-end, and much more...
System76 Pangolin Makes For A Nice All-AMD Linux Laptop
I spent the past few weeks testing the latest System76 Pangolin laptop that has been working out well as an all-AMD 15-inch laptop running the company's increasingly-popular Pop!_OS Linux distribution.