Phoronix

While Mesa 20.2 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 20.1.7 is out today as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source Linux graphics drivers...

NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan who specializes in the Linux kernel memory management subsystem today sent out a set of patches proposing the addition of 1GB THP support for the Linux kernel...

Intel Tiger Lake will soon begin appearing in laptops with an upgraded CPU architecture, the all new Iris Xe (Gen12) graphics, new AI capabilities, Thunderbolt 4, PCI Express 4.0, WiFi 6, and other new functionality. The Gen12 graphics have me most excited but there should be healthy improvements as well on the CPU side and not to mention improved connectivity.

Upstream developers are looking at phasing out Intel MMX that was popular in the late 90's but has since long been succeeded by SSE and AVX instruction set extensions...

SHADERed has been available for a while now as a cross-platform, open-source shader editor and for debugging and writing of graphics shaders. SHADERed not only runs on Linux and Windows now but through any modern web browser as of the new v1.4 release...

It's not clear if AMD has provided the independent RADV Vulkan driver developers at the likes of Valve, Red Hat, and Google with any Navi 2 hardware yet, but they do seem to be making progress on this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver separate from their official AMDVLK open-source driver...

Even more optimizations have now been queued up for GNOME 3.38 launching this month...

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler was traditionally known for its faster build speeds than GCC, in recent releases of GCC the build speeds have improved and in some areas LLVM/Clang has slowed down with further optimization passes and other work added to its growing code-base. As it stands right now, GCC is faster than Clang at compiling the Linux kernel...

Just over twenty years after the Linux From Scratch project was started as a guide/book to building all of the software components manually from source, Linux From Scratch 10.0 has been released...

Earlier this year Amazon announced Bottlerocket as a Linux distribution for running containers. This week Bottlerocket crossed the general availability milestone...

Intel's open-source engineers today sent out their latest patches bringing up the Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 for the next-gen PCIe device that offers load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication...

One important bit not covered in today's GeForce RTX 3070/3080/3090 announcement but now detailed via the NVIDIA website is confirmation that the RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs do in fact have dedicated AV1 hardware decode capabilities...

As widely expected amid a constant flow of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA just revealed their GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" series...

In addition to the new OpenBenchmarking.org now out in public "alpha", a number of new and updated test profiles were published in August for users of our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software...

With the soon to be released Mesa 20.2, the RADV Vulkan driver is using the ACO back-end by default that's been developed with funding by Valve as an alternative to AMD's official "AMDGPU" LLVM back-end. For those wondering how this shader compiler back-end compares and more intricate details of its design, some extensive documentation has finally been added to the Mesa tree...

The Qt Company has announced the feature freeze for the big Qt 6.0 toolkit milestone...

Intel developers engaging with upstream LLVM have been adding AMX support and other new features for next year's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" while as of a few days ago in LLVM 12 Git is the actual enabling of -march=sapphirerapids support...

Creative Labs last year released the high-end SoundBlaster AE-7 sound card. Sadly the company is back in their state where they do not provide official Linux support, but coming up for Linux 5.10 is the support for this sound card thanks to Connor McAdams who has worked on supporting prior SoundBlaster hardware under Linux...

August was an interesting month in terms of Linux/open-source activity though still another tough month during the coronavirus pandemic...

Going back to earlier this year has been work on an "adaptive" mode for P-State to improve GPU bound efficiency when the CPU is forced to share a power/thermal budget with other components like onboard graphics. That work is still advancing and an update was provided on it last week...