Open-source News

The Open-Source NVIDIA/Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver At The End Of 2019 - Poor But A Lot Of Hope

Phoronix - Thu, 12/26/2019 - 00:00
While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack has made some remarkable improvements this year not only from AMD but also the likes of Valve, unfortunately not as much can be said about the state of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. The Nouveau Linux graphics driver remains much slower than the proprietary driver, the hardware with the best support is several generations old, and due to the lack of signed firmware images there still isn't yet any open-source 3D for the Turing GPUs that have been shipping for months. But there may be hope in 2020.

Western Digital Has Been Developing A New Linux File-System: Zonefs

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 21:00
Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...

A Look At How Some Video Encoders Saw Their Performance Shift This Year With SVT AV1/VP9 Ascending

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 18:50
Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...

Virtual DCN / SR-IOV Display Support Being Worked On For AMDGPU In Linux 5.6

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 16:25
In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support...

How to run a business with open source: Top reads

opensource.com - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 16:01

Open source is ready to get to work, and in 2019, Opensource.com had many great articles about how organizations have adopted open source software or open methods to drive their business. As open source matures, we've seen open source not just replace proprietary software, but create entirely new business models.

Check out this list of five outstanding articles from Opensource.com in 2019 about running a business with open source.


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12 open source resources for kids and young adults

opensource.com - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 16:00

Are you looking to challenge your children (or even yourself) to learn new things about open source technologies? Whether you're in elementary school, high school, or college, or even a parent or teacher, Opensource.com has some great reading about open source technologies suitable for the younger generation. Here are our top 12 articles from 2019 on open source for students (and those who love them).


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Making trade-offs when writing Python code

opensource.com - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 16:00

Software development is a discipline rife with trade-offs. For every choice, there is an equally defensible but opposite choice. Make a method private? You're encouraging copy-paste. Make a method public? You're committing prematurely to an interface.

Software developers make hard choices every minute. While all the principles in the Zen of Python cover trade-offs to some extent, the following principles take the hardest, coldest look at some trade-offs.


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5 security tips from Santa

opensource.com - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 16:00

If you're reading this in 2019, it's almost Christmas (as celebrated according to the Western Christian calendar), and, like all children and IT professionals, it's time to write your letter to Santa/St. Nick/Father Christmas. Don't forget: those who have been good get nice presents and those who haven't get coal. Coal is not a clean-burning fuel, and with climate change well and truly upon us,1 you don't want to be going for the latter option.


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FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 13:00
While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...

LLVM Began Its Dominance Of The Compiler Landscape This Decade

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 07:20
Not only has LLVM's Clang compiler proven to become a viable alternative to C/C++ and is now widely used by many different vendors for building production software and nearly at parity for performance to GCC, but the LLVM compiler infrastructure has proven to be a huge success. Beyond Apple as one of the original stakeholders, LLVM is also used by multiple software projects within Intel, AMD is making extensive use of it for their graphics compiler and other purposes, and many other companies leveraging the LLVM projects for various often innovative purposes -- Microsoft is even using it within select projects...

Eric S Raymond Believes Reposurgeon Is Finally Ready For Full & Correct GCC Conversion

Phoronix - Wed, 12/25/2019 - 05:36
After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git...

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