The release candidate to GCC 11.1 as the first stable release of GCC 11 is now available for testing. If all goes well GCC 11.1.0 will officially debut next week while GCC 12 is now in development with their latest Git code.
Blender has an exciting year still ahead with a road-map they just published that does include Vulkan API support.
Just one week after having published the provisional Vulkan Video extensions, The Khronos Group has another exciting announcement today in the form of ratifying KTX 2.0.
AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux can finally enjoy Vulkan ray-tracing! AMD has published a new Radeon Software for Linux driver release that enables the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for use with RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.
Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák published an initial proposal this week as "a redesign of how Linux graphics drivers work."
Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved.
It's fairly common that many longtime Linux kernel developers use their personal email addresses for signing off on kernel patches or dealing with other patch work, especially when they are engaging with kernel development in their personal time too and occasionally jumping between employers over time while still sticking to interacting with the upstream kernel community, etc. There are also understandably some companies that mandate the use of their corporate email addresses for their official work/patches while now IBM seems to be taking things one step to the extreme.
It's been over one year already since the debut of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while fortunately DragonFlyBSD 6.0 will be here soon for this popular BSD operating system.
Microsoft is preparing the Linux kernel for some yet-to-debut Azure network functionality.
Of the many new features coming with Linux 5.12 is KFence, short for the Kernel Electric Fence. KFence is a low-overhead memory safety error detector/validator for the kernel with lower expected overhead costs than say the Kernel Address Sanitizer. I just wrapped up some benchmarks looking out for any overhead impact of KFence on Linux 5.12 in its near-final state.
Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs.
One of the exciting elements of last month's AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series launch was having same-day availability in public clouds. Microsoft as one of AMD's cloud partners worked closely to deliver launch-day availability in their public cloud using EPYC 7003 series processors with the new "HBv3" instances focused on high performance computing (HPC) virtual machines. Here are some benchmarks of the Azure HPv3 instances compared to prior generation Microsoft Azure HPC instances available on-demand in their cloud.
Firefox 88.0 is out today as the latest version of Mozilla's web browser.
The first release candidate is up for version 1.7 of the Portable Computing Language, the portable OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs and other accelerators. With POCL 1.7, OpenCL 3.0 is now being exposed and there is also improved support for SPIR-V binaries on CPUs.
It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.2.175 that introduced the Vulkan Video extensions while out this morning is now the Vulkan 1.2.176 revision.
Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks.
Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal.
While normally after seven weekly release candidates the next stable Linux kernel release is declared, Linux 5.12 is one of those special kernels needing at least an eighth RC before going gold.
While Arch Linux now has its own convenient installer for quick and easy Arch installs, for those in search of an out-of-the-box, desktop-friendly Arch based Linux distribution Endeavour OS remains one of the leading options in 2021. This weekend marks the availability of Endeavour's April 2021 install media refresh.
Jonathan Carter who was initially elected as Debian Project Leader last year to succeed Sam Hartman has now been re-elected for another year serving in this role.
Released last week was the LuxCoreRender 2.5 open-source physically based renderer. Significant with this v2.5 update is OptiX/RTX acceleration support in addition to its existing CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU render paths. Given that, here are some fresh benchmarks of LuxCoreRender 2.5 across an assortment of NVIDIA graphics cards.
If all goes well Linux 5.12 will be released tomorrow and in turn will kick off the Linux 5.13 merge window (otherwise 5.12-rc8 will be issued and the stable then a week later). In any case once the Linux 5.13 merge window does open there are a lot of prominent changes expected.
Realtek has contributed support for the RTL8153C and RTL8156 Ethernet chipsets to their "r8152" USB network driver for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.
Hitting the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch on Friday was the long in development WWAN subsystem/framework.
It's been another busy spring week in KDE land.
QUIC and HTTP/3 support is now appearing in Firefox Nightly and Beta build while it will begin its roll-out with the upcoming Firefox 88 stable release.
There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware.
While openSUSE/SUSE is known for their friendliness towards the KDE desktop, this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed updates have made GNOME 40 available on this rolling-release distribution.
Debian 11 continues inching closer towards release and it looks like the developers maintaining the "Devuan" fork won't be far behind with their re-base of the distribution focused on init system freedom.
Intel's engineers working on their open-source Linux-based Compute Runtime stack just released their latest version.
Not to be confused with Assembly programming, the GNU Assembly is the new platform for a number of GNU toolchain projects like GCC, GNU C Library, GnuCOBOL, and other packages as a neutral home.
With Mesa 21.1 now branched for this collection of primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers for Linux, feature development is on for Mesa 21.2 that will debut in Q3. One of the first major changes to land for Mesa 21.2 is the beginning of the graphics compiler support for Intel's forthcoming Xe-HP high performance graphics processor.
For GTC21 week NVIDIA has released version 11.3 of their CUDA toolkit.
Back in early 2018 were patches proposed for selectable platform support when building Intel's kernel graphics driver so users/distributions if desired could disable extremely old hardware support and/or cater kernel builds for specific Intel graphics generations. Three years later those patches have been re-proposed.