Open-source News

KDE Plasma 5.24 On Wayland To Support DRM Leasing For VR Headsets

Phoronix - Sun, 09/26/2021 - 01:34
With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase...

Facebook Has Been Working On BOLT'ing The Linux Kernel For Greater Performance

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 21:20
For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This "Binary Optimization and Layout Tool" is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler's LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image...

Intel's User Interrupts With Sapphire Rapids Looking Quite Great For Faster IPC

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 20:32
Earlier this month Intel engineers posted their initial Linux kernel enablement around x86 User Interrupts with this feature premiering with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" CPUs. As implied by the name, the User Interrupt functionality allows for interrupts to bypass the kernel for more efficient, low-latency, low-utilization interrupts being received by other user-space tasks. Intel talked more about User Interrupts this week at LPC2021...

OpenZFS 2.0.6 Released With Support For Newer Kernels

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 18:23
While the OpenZFS 2.1 feature release has been available since July, for those still using the OpenZFS 2.0.x series and not yet prepared to make the jump to that big new release with dRAID and other changes, OpenZFS 2.0.6 was released this week...

Wine-Staging 6.18 Released With 616 Patches Atop Upstream

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 17:52
Building off yesterday's Wine 6.18 development release is now the next Wine-Staging installment that has more than six hundred extra patches on top...

XWayland GLX Path Enables sRGB Support

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 15:00
Another item is now crossed off the XWayland TODO list with OpenGL sRGB support wired up...

6 open source tools for orchestral composers

opensource.com - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 15:00

As an avid amateur musician, I've worked with many different software programs to create both simple and complex pieces. As my projects have grown in scope, I've used composition software ranging from basic engraving to MIDI-compatible notation to playback of multi-instrument works. Composers have their choice of proprietary software, but I wanted to prove that, regardless of the need, there is an open source tool that will more than satisfy them.


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Wine 6.18 Released With HID Joystick Enabled By Default

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 06:01
Wine 6.18 has been popped as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software that allows Windows applications and games to run under Linux and in turn what also powers Steam Play's Proton...

BattlEye To Support Valve's Steam Deck / Proton

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 03:52
Yesterday it was Epic Games confirming Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux and Wine/Proton ahead of the Steam Deck launch and today it's BattlEye confirming Proton / Steam Deck support...

IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 02:50
IBM engineer Daniel Axtens presented at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the prospects of using the Rust programming language for creating modules for the GRUB2 boot-loader...

GNU Coreutils 9.0: cp Now Enables CoW By Default + Copy Offload, wc Now Uses AVX2

Phoronix - Sat, 09/25/2021 - 01:36
Coreutils 9.0 is now available and it's a significant update to this collection of common open-source utilities found on effectively all Linux systems...

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