Open-source News

Mesa Devs Discuss Potentially Dropping Non-Gallium Drivers Or Forking Code For Gallium

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 20:56
Longtime open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has kicked off a discussion over the possibility in the not too distant future of either dropping non-Gallium3D drivers from Mesa (and moving them off to a maintenance branch or the like) or forking some of Mesa's existing code to allow it to be better optimized for Gallium3D use-cases. Due to raised concerns, other possibilities are also being expressed like simply moving ahead with optimizing the Mesa code-base for Gallium3D at a cost of potentially hitting dead code more often with the classic drivers...

RadeonSI Lands SDMA Copy Support For Vega/GFX9

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 20:24
The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has finally landed SDMA copy support for Vega/GFX9 graphics hardware, which should principally benefit compute shaders and other cases...

Linux 5.5 Begins Plumbing Secure Boot Infrastructure For POWER9

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 17:42
With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware...

Java vs. Python: Which should you choose?

opensource.com - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 16:02

Let's compare the two most popular and powerful programming languages in the world: Java and Python! Both languages have huge community support and libraries to perform almost any programming task, although selecting a programming language usually depends on the developer's use case. After you compare and contrast, please make sure to answer our poll to share your opinion on which is best.


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4 ways to control the flow of your awk script

opensource.com - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 16:01

There are many ways to control the flow of an awk script, including loops, switch statements and the break, continue, and next commands.

Sample data

Create a sample data set called colours.txt and copy this content into it:


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Spice up your Linux desktop with Cinnamon

opensource.com - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 16:00

When GNOME 3 was released, some GNOME users were not ready to give up GNOME 2. The Linux Mint project was so dissatisfied with GNOME 3 that it started its own desktop as an alternative, and thus the Cinnamon desktop was born.


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Linux 5.5 Provides Knob To Toggle ASPM Link States Individually - Better Power-Savings

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 15:18
ASPM can be a big boost to help power-savings on Linux laptops and desktops as shown by a prominent kernel regression a number of years ago. However, a number of Linux drivers are forced to disable Active State Power Management (ASPM) due to quirky/buggy hardware where it ends up not being sane to enable that power-saving feature by default. But with the Linux 5.5 kernel is support for toggling ASPM link states via sysfs as an easy-to-perform manner for achieving better power-savings with friendly devices...

Polo – A Modern Light-weight File Manager for Linux

Tecmint - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 15:12
Polo is a modern, light-weight and advanced file manager for Linux, that comes with a number of advanced features that are not present in many commonly used file managers or file browsers on Linux...

Open Source Firmware Conference 2019 Videos Posted

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 14:27
Taking place back in September at Google and Facebook facilities was the Open-Source Firmware Conference (OSFC 2019). For those not able to attend, video recordings of those talks are now freely available online...

Before Ending 2019, Vintage SiS X.Org Driver Sees A New Release

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 13:01
xf86-video-sis 0.12.0 is available this week as a new version of the SiS display driver for X.Org systems in supporting Silicon Integrated Systems' display hardware...

AMDGPU Fixes For Linux 5.5 Include AMDKFD For PowerPC, Fix For Old ATI R100/R200 GPUs

Phoronix - Wed, 12/04/2019 - 08:00
Following last week's big batch of DRM graphics driver updates for the Linux 5.5 merge window, AMD and the community engaging in Linux 5.5 testing have now sent in their first round of fixes for this next version of the Linux kernel...

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