Phoronix

This week's Vulkan 1.2.158 spec release brought the fragment shading rate extension to control the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This can be useful similar to OpenGL and Direct3D support for helping to allow different, less important areas of the screen be shaded less than areas requiring greater detail/focus...

The AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel graphics driver continues seeing work on next-generation GPU support around the forthcoming "Big Navi" GPUs...

With Ubuntu 20.10 due for release this week I have begun testing near-final Ubuntu 20.10 builds on many more systems in the lab. Larger than our normal distribution/OS comparisons, here is the culmination of running hundreds of benchmarks (366 tests to be exact) under both Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with all available updates and then again on the Ubuntu 20.10 development state while testing on Intel Comet Lake.

Mesa 20.3 has merged a long work-in-progress patch series providing support for going from the modern NIR intermediate representation to TGSI as the conventional Gallium3D IR...

Not only is there a new OpenBSD release this week but the NetBSD crew also issued a big update in the form of NetBSD 9.1...

The ODF 1.3 Open Document Format specification was approved by the OASIS Committee at the start of the year and now as we approach the end of the year The Document Foundation is hoping to see ODF 1.3 support completed soon for this leading open-source office suite...

The System76 Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series is already a beast, but now this Linux PC vendor has managed to outdo themselves once again with the Thelio Mega...

Firefox 82.0 is now available as the latest release of Mozilla's web browser that continues on their expedited release cycles...

The Xen virtualization work for the Linux 5.10 kernel revolves around security...

AMD has issued their first open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter with AMDVLK 2020.Q4.1...

Last week saw the XFS file-system with Linux 5.10 support timestamps until the year 2486 rather than year 2038 and other improvements too. This week a second round of XFS work has landed for Linux 5.10...

It was just two weeks ago that the Qt 6.0 Alpha released, but in aiming to get the release back on schedule, the beta is already shipping today...

The FreeType text rendering library is out with version 2.10.4 today as an important security update...

The RISC-V architecture code with Linux 5.10 adds the ability for booting via (U)EFI...

From my Tiger Lake testing so far with the Core i7 1165G7, the "Gen12" Xe Graphics have been quite compelling with a very nice upgrade over Gen11 and especially obvious win over the very common still Gen9 graphics. With Mesa 20.3, another measurable performance is on the way for the Intel Vulkan driver with Tiger Lake...

The fourth release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for testing of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms...

Trisquel 9.0 has been released as one of the few Linux distributions approved by the Free Software Foundation...

The FUSE implementation for supporting file-systems in user-space is seeing important kernel work merged for Linux 5.10...

Git 2.29 is now available with experimental support for using SHA-256 to increase security of code repositories over the possibility of intentional SHA-1 collisions with the current indices...

An independent party has slowly begun merging patches into mainline Mesa for allowing the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to build on Microsoft Windows...