Phoronix

IWD is the multi-year effort by Intel's open-source group to create a new Linux wireless daemon that could potentially replace WPA-Supplicant. IWD 0.19 is the new release available that arrived at the end of the weekend and carrying new features...

If all goes well Mesa 19.1.4 will be released on Tuesday as the newest stable point release to this collection of OpenGL/Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Mesa 19.1.4 is bringing around four dozen patches that accumulated over the later half of July and it's particularly heavy on Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan driver fixes...

Debian's annual developer conference, DebConf, wrapped up last week in Curitiba, Brasil. The slide decks and video recordings for many of those presentations are now available...

Currently when passing "-flto" for enabling Link-Time Optimizations with the GCC compiler, it defaults to using a single core/thread for carrying out the optimizations and code generation. There has been support for specifying a number of threads to use for carrying out this link-time work in parallel while finally in GCC 10 that is being enabled by default...

Monado as an open-source implementation of the Khronos OpenXR standard for AR/VR devices continues taking form though isn't quite ready yet for end-users...

Intel's modern "Iris" Gallium3D driver has exposed GLSL 4.60 compatibility (the shading language requirements for OpenGL 4.6) but when creating an OpenGL compatibility context it's been at 1.40 for the old OpenGL 3.1 requirements. Fortunately, the compatibility mode now too exposes 4.60 support...

There is one month to go until KDE's annual Akademy developer conference in Milan while open-source contributors to this desktop environment remain hard at work over the summer on making various improvements...

Shared one month ago was the initial work done on implementing a Vulkan renderer for Godot, the increasingly-used open-source cross-platform game engine. That Godot Vulkan support continues maturing along with other features that will form the basis of Godot 4.0...

One of the many interesting Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year has been to improve the Wine support on NetBSD. Thanks to student developer Naveen Narayanan, that is becoming a reality...

Merged for the GCC 9 compiler release that launched earlier this year was the preliminary AMD Radeon "GCN" GPU compiler back-end. In that initial release it wasn't particularly useful as the GPU offloading bits for the popular programming APIs/models wasn't supported so for now could just run some basic single-threaded programs. But now those interesting GPU offloading bits are pending for GCC 10...

Earlier this week the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" added support for Wave32 with compute shaders on the new Navi graphics processors. That RADV Wave32 support has now been extended for more shader types...

The Qt Company on Friday issued the release candidate for the upcoming Qt Creator 4.10 integrated development environment...

Hot on the heels of the upstream Wine 4.13 release following a long summer retreat, Wine-Staging 4.13 is now available with the latest testing/experimental patches re-based atop the newest Wine code...

Intel's NEO OpenCL run-time stack has been living by the "release early, release often" mantra with continuing to see frequent new updates for this OpenCL stack...

In addition to the Intel DRM driver landing lots of feature code into DRM-Next for the Linux 5.4 kernel cycle coming up in September, the DRM-Misc-Next crew for collecting core infrastructure changes and work to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers has also been seeing new 5.4 work...

Wine 4.12 was released back on 5 July while finally today has been succeeded by Wine 4.13, which is normally seeing updates on a two-week release cycle...

Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain...

In addition to GNOME's involvement and stewarding of the Outreachy program (back to the days when it was known as GNOME's "Outreach Program for Women"), they have just launched an Inclusion and Diversity Team to help the desktop environment community become more inclusive...

While this year's GCC 9 compiler release brought initial support for AMD Zen 2 processors with the Znver2 target, the support was sadly incomplete. While the GCC 9 support added some of the new instructions, it wasn't complete (such as RDPRU support remains missing) and the cost tables and scheduler model were not updated from Znver1 to account for the microarchitectural changes. Thankfully, SUSE's compiler experts recently fixed up this support for the GCC 10 compiler and more recently were able to get it back-ported for the upcoming GCC 9.2 for the Linux distributions that will upgrade to that point release. Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance impact of that updated AMD Zen 2 compiler code.

Intel's open-source driver team has sent in their initial batch of kernel graphics driver changes to DRM-Next for material that will be targeting the Linux 5.4 cycle later this year...