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QNX Support Restored For SDL3
QNX Support Restored For SDL3
4 Hours Ago - Linux Gaming - SDL3 + QNX - 1 Comment

When SDL3 development kicked off last November for this open-source library that is widely used by cross-platform games and other software, QNX support was removed alongside other old targets. Just months later, the QNX platform support is being revived.

Intel Releases GPGMM v0.1 GPU Memory Management Library
Intel Releases GPGMM v0.1 GPU Memory Management Library
5 Hours Ago - Intel - GPGMM v0.1 - Add A Comment

Intel has published v0.1 of its GPGMM software, the open-source General-Purpose GPU Memory Management Library. This library is intended to be used by modern software employing the Vulkan or D3D12 APIs for helping application developers deal with low-level video memory management.

27 March

Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games
Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games
27 March 02:00 PM EDT - Radeon - RADV Memory Optimization - 11 Comments

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones
Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Released For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS On Smartphones
27 March 12:50 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal - 5 Comments

Ubuntu Touch as the community maintained version of Ubuntu Linux for smartphones and tablets has for years been frustratingly limited to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as its base operating system for when Canonical had abandoned their smartphone ambitions. Today though that has finally changed with Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal having been released that moves things forward to an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base.

Intel Sapphire Rapids Performance With Google Cloud Compute Engine C3
Intel Sapphire Rapids Performance With Google Cloud Compute Engine C3
27 March 12:00 PM EDT - Processors - 1 Comment

Back in October Google announced their Compute Engine C3 instances in private preview that featured 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors as well as making use of Google's custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Since then, back in January, was the big Sapphire Rapids launch with the likes of the Xeon Platinum 8490H being released. Last month meanwhile Google promoted the C3 VMs to public preview state. The Sapphire Rapids C3 VMs remain in "public preview" from Google Cloud during which time there are no charges involved for the CPU costs. For those wondering about the core-for-core performance of Sapphire Rapids in Google Cloud, here are my initial benchmarks of the C3 series.

AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13
AmpereOne Sees Last Minute Compiler Tuning Ahead Of GCC 13
27 March 10:39 AM EDT - GNU - AmpereOne Optimizations - 7 Comments

Going back to late 2021 was the initial GCC compiler patch for "Ampere-1" for that next-gen AArch64 server processor while last year this successor to Ampere Altra (Max) was formally announced under the AmpereOne brand. That initial compiler support appeared in GCC 12 while ahead of the GCC 13 release in the coming weeks has been some last minute tuning for the AmpereOne cost table.

XWayland Lands Fix For At Least One Game Hanging It & Causing 100% CPU Usage
XWayland Lands Fix For At Least One Game Hanging It & Causing 100% CPU Usage
27 March 07:02 AM EDT - X.Org - Resident Evil Causes XWayland Evil - 66 Comments

While XWayland is in fairly good shape for enjoying both native and emulated games relying on X11 to run atop Wayland compositors for Linux gaming, occasionally different peculiar issues are uncovered. The most recent issue analyzed and addressed in XWayland Git is over the game Resident Evil 6 causing XWayland to hang and consume 100% of the CPU resources on launching that title.

OBS Studio Lands AV1 & HEVC RTMP Streaming Support
OBS Studio Lands AV1 & HEVC RTMP Streaming Support
27 March 06:44 AM EDT - Multimedia - AV1 + HEVC RTMP Streaming - 12 Comments

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.

FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix
FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 Released With One Last Fix
27 March 06:30 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 - Add A Comment

FreeBSD 13.2-RC4 was released this weekend while it's already been replaced by FreeBSD 13.2-RC5 to land one more fix prior to making the final release preparations on this next stable update to this BSD operating system.

26 March

Linux Will Stop Randomizing Per-CPU Entry Area When KASLR Is Not Active
Linux Will Stop Randomizing Per-CPU Entry Area When KASLR Is Not Active
26 March 11:40 AM EDT - Linux Security - Avoids Randomizing When KASLR Off - 2 Comments

With the Linux 6.2 release kernel developers addressed "a tasty target for attackers" after it was realized that the per-CPU entry data was not being randomized, even in the presence of Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The per-CPU entry area randomization has been present since Linux 6.3 but then was realized it's being activated even if KASLR was disabled, so now that is changing to avoid possible confusion.

25 March

24 March

Intel XeSS SDK 1.1 Released
24 March 01:28 PM EDT - Intel - Intel XeSS SDK 1.1 - 4 Comments

The Intel XeSS SDK 1.0 release happened last September while now has been succeeded by XeSS SDK 1.1. Though like the prior release, the XeSS SDK isn't fully open-source with just the bits around game integration being public.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 "FSR 3" Will Be Open-Source
24 March 10:48 AM EDT - Radeon - MIT Open-Source - 33 Comments

AMD has been teasing FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) as the latest version of their game upscaling tech that will be released later in the year. AMD began showing off FSR 3 to game developers this week at GDC while also re-affirming their open-source commitment.

Intel Arc Graphics Show Good Potential For Linux Workstation OpenGL Performance
24 March 10:30 AM EDT - Graphics Cards - 28 Comments

Recently I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc Graphics Linux gaming performance with the newest open-source drivers. While it was a letdown with some of the newer Steam Play games still not working due to current limitations of the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver and some Vulkan performance issues in other titles, one area that stood out was the very good Linux OpenGL performance. That made me curious to look at the workstation OpenGL performance for Intel Arc Graphics, which is the focus of today's testing.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Begins Rolling Out GCC 13
24 March 12:00 AM EDT - GNU - GNU Compiler Collection 13 - 11 Comments

While GCC 13 is working its way toward its official GCC 13.1 stable release in the next few weeks, with this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release updates it has already begun switching over to this major annual compiler update.

23 March

Intel LAM Will Try Again For Linux 6.4
23 March 08:28 AM EDT - Intel - Linear Address Masking - 2 Comments

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle.

X.Org Needs More People To Run For The Board
23 March 05:59 AM EDT - X.Org - X.Org Board of Directors - 44 Comments

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election.

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