Phoronix

While Qt Quick 3D has been talked up a lot recently with The Qt Company's plans for that new 3D module inside the current Qt5 and future Qt6 tool-kits, Qt 3D itself is not going away...

The Broadcom "V3D" Gallium3D driver that is most notably used by the new Raspberry Pi 4 boards now is effectively at OpenGL ES 3.1 support within the newest Mesa 19.3 code...

The situation is looking good for seeing the Linux 5.4 kernel debut as stable with today's release of 5.4-rc4 being another "normal" release that isn't coming in too heavy...

For those hoping that the Disney+ streaming service would work on Linux in conjunction with a modern web browser, sadly that is not set to be the case. While the likes of Netflix and Hulu can play from Linux desktop web browsers, Disney's tightened Digital Rights Management around their new service doesn't allow for Linux support with current browsers...

Well, here is a surprise... The Libre RISC-V project that is trying to build an "open-source GPU" more along the lines as a Vulkan accelerator is looking at other options besides RISC-V. While RISC-V is royalty-free and open-source in nature, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton is not content with the RISC-V Foundation and is evaluating the likes of POWER and MIPS...

AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening feature is designed to improve image quality with minimal performance costs. However, it is only supported by Radeon Polaris / Vega / Navi graphics cards and only under Microsoft Windows 10. An independent open-source project has implemented contrast adaptive sharpening support for Vulkan that is similar to Radeon Image Sharpening but will work for any Vulkan-enabled GPU -- including NVIDIA GPUs...

Prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has shared more of the group's plans for the planned 2020 release of Xfce 4.16...

With the early Librem 5 smartphones now shipping from their "Aspen" batch and recent Reddit discussions about the Librem 5 roping him in, former Purism CTO Zlatan Todoric has agreed to a brief interview on Phoronix...

GNOME 3.35.1 was released this morning as the first development release towards GNOME 3.36 next March...

KDE developers remain busy this autumn on addressing bugs in the recent KDE Plasma 5.17 release and tackling early feature work for Plasma 5.18. Plus work on KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications is as busy as ever...

Landing this week in Mesa 19.3-devel were more functions being implemented around the big OpenGL EXT_direct_state_access extension...

While SYCL has been around for five years as a Khronos standard providing a single-source C++ programming model for exploiting OpenCL, it has yet to reach its prime but demand for it is picking up with Intel working to upstream their SYCL back-end in LLVM, SYCL becoming part of their programming model with oneAPI and Xe Graphics, and other vendors also jumping on the SYCL bandwagon. Codeplay has now provided an open-source SYCL learning code for those interested in this higher-level alternative to straight OpenCL programming...

While the MSM+Freedreno open-source graphics driver stack already supports the Adreno 500 and 600 series, one of the GPUs not seeing support until now was the basic Adreno 510. Kernel patches are pending for A510 enablement while the Mesa support was already merged...

System76 has released their newest operating system update of their Pop!_OS distribution based upon Ubuntu. Pop!_OS 19.10 is based upon this week's release of Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" but adding various extra changes and enhancements...

Intel developers have been working on the Cloud Hypervisor that is written in Rust and built atop KVM as an open-source VMM designed for running modern cloud workloads while being focused on just supporting modern software/interfaces and relying upon para-virtualized (VirtIO) devices without legacy support. This week marked a new release of this forward-looking KVM-based hypervisor solution...

Back in February for LLVM Clang 9.0 was the initial AMD Zen 2 "znver2" enablement, but like the GCC support at the time it was the very basics. With time GCC picked up Zen 2 scheduler improvements and other work while sadly in the case of LLVM the improvements are still pending...

With the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel release there is now an exFAT file-system driver based on an old Samsung code drop of their exFAT driver support for mobile devices. This comes after Microsoft made the exFAT specification public recently and gave their blessing for a native Linux driver for the file-system. The Linux developers acknowledge though the current exFAT code is "horrible" and a "pile of crap" but is within the staging area...

Fresh off yesterday's Wine 4.18 release, Wine-Staging 4.18 is now available for those preferring the more experimental blend of Wine that incorporates various testing patches atop Wine...

Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 5.17, a new release of the independent kwin-lowlatency code has been re-based against version 5.17...

We are getting mighty close to the release of FreeBSD 12.1 as the next installment of FreeBSD 12 for 2019. It's looking like FreeBSD 12.1 will indeed be ready to set sail in early November...