Open-source News

Glimpse 0.1 Released As The Rebranded Fork Of The GIMP

Phoronix - Sat, 11/23/2019 - 05:25
The inaugural release of Glimpse is now available, the fork born out of calls for renaming The GIMP project to something not considered offensive...

RADV's ACO Back-End Is Helping Radeon Navi Linux Gaming Performance

Phoronix - Sat, 11/23/2019 - 04:09
It's been almost two months since last looking at the RADV ACO performance for this shader compiler back-end alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM code. ACO is making its debut in the upcoming Mesa 19.3 release while since the last round of testing have been more optimizations and fixes as well as getting the Navi/GFX10 support in place. In this article are some fresh benchmarks of the Vulkan RADV ACO support for not only Polaris and Vega but also the Radeon RX 5700 Navi graphics cards.

Linux 5.5 Cycle Kicks Off Next Week With Exciting Changes On Tap

Phoronix - Sat, 11/23/2019 - 02:23
The Linux 5.4 kernel is to be released on Sunday and that will in turn kick-off the Linux 5.5 merge window. Here is a look at some of the changes on the table for what will in turn be the first major stable kernel release of 2020...

KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation

The Linux Foundation - Sat, 11/23/2019 - 01:00

Project will build on growth to advance electronic design automation for engineers  

San Francisco, Calif., November 22, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that it will host KiCad, a free, open source software suite for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The program facilitates the design of schematics for electronic circuits and their conversion to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs. Under the Linux Foundation, KiCad will expand its community and ensure long-term sustainability.

“KiCad is a set of applications used by engineers focused on board design,” said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. “It’s a professional and free piece of software that gives engineers the freedom to use the software anywhere and across any platform, not tying them to specific hardware architectures. Its progress in creating an integrated environment for schematic capture and PCB layout design has been massive and the Linux Foundation’s infrastructure and governance model will give it the required support to sustain that growth for the long term.”

“We’ve seen the program skyrocket in use over recent years, with some board vendors reporting more than 15 percent of new board orders designed using KiCad,” said Wayne Stambaugh, KiCad Project Lead. “To accommodate this rate of growth there was a need to re-evaluate our revenue support model to help us attract more people to the project. Under the Linux Foundation we will have increased flexibility to spend donations to help move the project forward as well as an increased exposure to potential new donors.”

This project is also participating in the CommunityBridge platform, created earlier this year by the Linux Foundation to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.

KiCad was launched in 1992 and today has corporate, community, and individual donors including Digi- Key, System76, AISLER and NextPCB, with many donating through CERN. The main tools that exist within the package are used to create schematics, printed circuit board layouts, spice simulations, bill of materials, artwork, Gerber files, and 3D views of the PCB and its components. KiCad is a cross platform tool, running on Windows, Linux, and Apple MacOS and is released under the open source GNU GPL.

For more information please visit http://www.kicad-pcb.org/ or KiCad blog, Facebook or Twitter pages.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

 

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The post KiCad Joins Linux Foundation to Advance Electronic Design Automation appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

systemd 244-RC1 Released With Many Changes

Phoronix - Sat, 11/23/2019 - 00:55
It looks like a big new systemd release will be out in time for Christmas...

NVIDIA 440.36 Linux Driver Released With Official GTX 1650 SUPER Support

Phoronix - Fri, 11/22/2019 - 23:15
Building off the NVIDIA 440 stable Linux driver release from earlier this month, the NVIDIA 440.36 Linux driver is out today as a small update...

PHP 5.3 To PHP 7.4 Performance Benchmarks On AMD EPYC

Phoronix - Fri, 11/22/2019 - 22:26
With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev...

Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance

Phoronix - Fri, 11/22/2019 - 20:44
Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too...

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