Open-source News

Raspberry Pi 4 BCM43455 NVRAM Addition Hits Linux-Firmware Git  Phoronix

Rav1e's weekly-ish pre-releases for this Rust-written AV1 encoder have been focusing a lot on better performance via hand-written x86 Assembly, making use of SIMD extensions, and other fine tuning of their encoder. With this newest pre-release, another ~20% speed-up was obtained...

Intel Revises The Shared Virtual Memory Support For Their Linux Graphics Driver  Phoronix

Intel Revises The Shared Virtual Memory Support For Their Linux Graphics Driver  Phoronix

In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good...

When KDE 4 was released in 2008, KDE 3 went into support mode until support was dropped entirely. That's the usual lifecycle of software, desktops included, but the KDE 3 fanbase wasn't universally pleased with KDE 4, and some of them decided a fork was in order.

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Linux 5.5-rc2 Kernel Released  Phoronix

Cities and municipalities around the world are facing serious problems that are affecting citizens' safety and access to government services. Take Baltimore, for example, the home of Mosslabs.io and its founder/organizer Jacob Green, which experienced a ransomware attack that shut down the city's digital services for most of the summer, preventing people from buying real estate and doing other everyday business with the local government.

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Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change...

Several Linux Browsers Blocked from Accessing Google Services  Softpedia News

KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software...

D9VK 0.40 is out today as the latest feature update to this Direct3D 9 over Vulkan translation layer based on DXVK...

Mesa 20.0-devel Intel Gallium3D Performance Benchmarks Are Looking Good For Ice Lake  Phoronix

While the Mesa 20.0 cycle is quite young and still over one month to go until the feature freeze for this next quarterly installment of these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers, it's quite exciting already with the changes building up. In particular, on the Intel side they are still positioning for the Intel Gallium3D driver to become the new default on hardware of generations Broadwell and newer. Here is a quick look at how the Intel Gallium3D performance is looking compared to their legacy "i965" classic OpenGL driver that is the current default...

Google prevents some Linux users from signing into its services  Reclaim The Net

When it comes to PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, the drives we have been using are the Corsair Force MP600 that have been working out great for pairing with the newest AMD Ryzen systems. But a Black Friday deal had the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD on sale, so I decided to pick one up to see how it was performing on Ubuntu Linux. Here are benchmarks of the Sabrent Gen4 NVMe SSD, which in the 1TB capacity can be found for $150~170 USD.

Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVMe Gen4 Linux Benchmarks Against Other SATA/NVMe SSDs  Phoronix

checkra1n 0.9.7 up for grabs, Linux release may take time due to licensing issues  PiunikaWeb

Way back in 2005 the GNOME "10x10 Goal" was formed to "own 10% of the global desktop market by 2010." Now approaching ten years past that failed goal, GNOME or even the broader Linux desktop marketshare is still well off from seeing a 10% market-share...

Ten Years Past GNOME's 10x10 Goal, The Linux Desktop Is Still Far From Having A 10% Marketshare  Phoronix