Open-source News

XpdfReader is an open source PDF reader for Windows and Linux  Ghacks Technology News

Canonical is transitioning Ubuntu's support in the Amazon AWS environment to have a rolling-release model for its kernel albeit other packages will remain under their traditional stable release update handling. At least though it's good they will be more punctually offering new kernel versions in the cloud..

Ubuntu Begins Offering A Rolling Release Kernel For The Amazon Cloud  Phoronix

How to compress files on Linux 5 ways  Network World

Red Hat and ZTE have developed a new solution aimed at helping service providers more effectively deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) for Red Hat OpenStack Platform on ZTE XCLOUD hardware. This collaboration is designed to aid telecommunications companies gain greater traction in deploying 5G services with the backing of a common telco cloud infrastructure.

Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs...

Facebook and Intel have been working on being able to enable Xeon Scalable Open Compute Project systems with an open-source FSP...

It looks like better support for Windows programs running under Wine interacting directly with USB devices could finally be on the horizon...

Microsoft releases final Windows 10 May 2020 Update to testers  The Verge

Solaris 11.4 SRU20 released  OS News

OpenJDK 15 To Have Better Out-Of-The-Box Performance  Phoronix

It turns out our recent OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 14 benchmarks caught some on Oracle's Java team by surprise. But they were able to replicate the outcome and as a result OpenJDK 15 will be seeing better out-of-the-box performance...

Ubuntu Server 20.04 CPU Security Mitigation Performance Impact  Phoronix

Earlier this week I published new benchmarks looking at the desktop CPU security mitigation impact with Ubuntu 20.04. Here are similar tests done in looking at the server mitigation impact with the near-final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while testing server workloads on Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server platforms. Like the desktop tests, the mitigation impact with the out-of-the-box protections against Spectre, Meltdown, and friends is being compared to booting the same Ubuntu 20.04 release with "mitigations=off" for run-time disabling of the relevant mitigations on each platform.

BreadBee: A tiny alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero that supports Linux and costs just US$10  Notebookcheck.net

Mir 1.8 is available today as the newest feature update to this display stack developed by Canonical that currently is focused on providing a pleasant Wayland compositor experience especially for kiosk-type environments and others wanting to transition from X11 to Wayland...

Mir 1.8 Released With HiDPI Improvements, Better Compatibility Outside Of Ubuntu  Phoronix

Toughened up Coffee Lake computer family includes a PCIe x16 model  LinuxGizmos.com

Developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, Open Shading Language is the de facto standard shading language for VFX and animation

LOS ANGELES, CA, April 16, 2020 – The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a collaborative effort to advance open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, announced that Open Shading Language (OSL) has been approved as the Foundation’s sixth hosted project. Initially developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, Open Shading Language is the de facto standard shading language for VFX and animation and was recognized with an Academy Scientific and Technical Award in 2017.

OSL was released as open source in 2010 so it could be used by other visual effects and animation studios and rendering software vendors. It has since become the main embedded language in several industry-standard renderers, and it has been used in 100+ films including Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Angry Birds Movie 2, and Men in Black: International.

“Over the past ten years, Open Shading Language has grown to become a critical component of the vfx and animation ecosystem, widely used in production and embedded into several industry-standard renderers,” said Rob Bredow, SVP, Executive Creative Director and Head of Industrial Light & Magic, and Governing Board Chair of Academy Software Foundation. “Many of our members and projects rely on and support OSL, so it’s a natural fit for the Foundation. We look forward to working with the OSL community and supporting the project’s continued development and growth.”

OSL is a small, but rich, language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications, ideal for describing materials, lights, displacement, and pattern generation. It is embedded in many commercial products and used as a dependency in other open source projects. A full list of renderers and other systems utilizing OSL is available here.

“We have seen firsthand how other projects have grown as part of the Academy Software Foundation, and we believe that joining the Foundation is the next step to help us expand the Open Shading Language community,” said Larry Gritz, Software Engineering Architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Open Shading Language founder and chief architect. “We have some major development efforts underway, including bringing OSL to a full GPU ray traced implementation, and the additional resources, support, and increased community involvement that the Foundation facilitates will be highly beneficial.”

The Academy Software Foundation will maintain and further develop the project with oversight provided by a technical steering committee. All newly accepted projects, including Open Shading Language, start in incubation while they work to meet the high standards of the Academy Software Foundation and later graduate to full adoption. This allows the Academy Software Foundation to consider and support projects at different levels of maturity and industry adoption, as long as they align with the Foundation’s mission to increase the quality and quantity of contributions to the content creation industry’s open source software base.

Developers interested in learning more or contributing to Open Shading Language can sign up to join the mailing list.

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About the Academy Software Foundation

Developed in partnership by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation was created to ensure a healthy open source community by providing a neutral forum for open source software developers in the motion picture and broader media industries to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound. The Academy Software Foundation is home to OpenVDB, OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenCue, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. For more information about the Academy Software Foundation, visit https://www.aswf.io/.

Media Inquiries
Emily Olin
Academy Software Foundation

 

The post Open Shading Language Becomes Sixth Academy Software Foundation Project appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

AMD Joins Academy Software Foundation as a Premier Member  Benzinga