Open-source News

The Linux Kernel Highlights Of The 2010s From Torvalds' Sabbatical To Dealing With Vulnerabilities

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 14:09
Going along with our other end of year and decade recaps, here is a look back at the Linux kernel highlights for the 2010s...

The Experimental GCN 1.0 GPU Support Might Be Dropped From AMDGPU Linux Driver

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 13:00
By default the Linux kernel selects the aging Radeon DRM driver for GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" and GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" hardware (as well as all older ATI/AMD GPUs) while it's GCN 1.2 and newer that defaults to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver. But for years there has been experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 support available via kernel module options, but now for the original GCN GPUs that code is at risk of being dropped...

MLIR Lands In LLVM - Boosting LLVM For Heterogeneous Hardware, Machine Learning

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 08:00
Landing as a great Christmas present for LLVM developers interested in heterogeneous hardware compilation, TensorFlow and other machine learning use-cases was MLIR within the LLVM source tree...

Fwupd 1.3.6 Firmware Updater Released With Initial Windows Support

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 06:05
Fwupd 1.3.6 was released today for ending out a very successful year for this firmware updating utility that works in-step with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for allowing hardware firmware/BIOS updating on Linux systems...

How The Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi Linux Performance Has Evolved Since Launch

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 02:00
As part of our year-end articles we already provided benchmarks looking at the Radeon OpenGL / Vulkan driver performance for 2019. That testing was done using Polaris and Vega given their GPU support prior to 2019, but for those wondering about the Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" performance for these GPUs that launched this summer, here are some end-of-year tests.

Trinity Desktop R14.0.7 Released For Keeping KDE 3 Spirit Alive In 2020

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 00:58
For those still having fond memories for the KDE 3 desktop days as we roll into 2020, the Trinity Desktop Environment as a fork of K Desktop Environment 3.5 is still pushing along with maintaining these aging open-source software packages...

Mesa's Radeon R600 Gallium3D Driver Now Has NIR Support Under Review

Phoronix - Tue, 12/31/2019 - 00:04
Similar to the trend with other Mesa drivers, the Radeon R600g driver for supporting Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards has been seeing experimental work to introduce a NIR back-end for this modern intermediate representation. That R600 NIR support now has a merge request open meaning it could possibly land still for Mesa 20.0...

The Debate Over GCC's SVN-to-Git Conversion Approach Won't Be Settled This Year

Phoronix - Mon, 12/30/2019 - 21:52
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) plans for transitioning from SVN to Git over New Year's Day looks like for sure now that goal will not be realized. There still is no firm consensus over which SVN to Git conversion approach to utilize...

Some Of The Workloads Still Seeing Lower Performance On Linux 5.5 Git

Phoronix - Mon, 12/30/2019 - 20:39
Last night I shared the results from what's causing one of the performance regressions in Linux 5.5 but sadly more regressions remain that are currently being tracked down...

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