PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort.
Going back to the start of 2020 we've been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month's time.
Big "open-source" achievements aren't too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it's possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan.
Google's Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020.
AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month.
CodeWeavers working under contract for Valve on their Wine downstream Proton is out with a new update to their Proton 5.0 series.
While Clear Linux is well known as being the performance-optimized Linux distribution out of Intel and catered towards performing the best on their hardware (though as we continue to show, Clear Linux does also perform incredibly well on AMD hardware too and generally faster than other distributions), when it comes to AMD-optimized distributions the primary example remains OpenMandriva. Since 2018 OpenMandriva has been providing an AMD Zen optimized build where their operating system and entire package archive is built with the "znver1" compiler optimizations. As it's been almost a year since last looking at OpenMandriva's Zen optimized build, here are some fresh benchmarks using the newly-released OpenMandriva 4.1.
To date the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver hasn't supported AMD's GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler but that is changing.
Version 20.07.15711 of the Intel Compute Runtime was released this morning.
Intel's ICE driver for the Ethernet E800 series is seeing a new member of the family come Linux 5.7.
The Linux EFI boot code is going through some "spring cleaning" ahead of the RISC-V EFI support landing that still could make it for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring.
The first batch of DRM-Misc changes following the recent Linux 5.6 merge window have been merged into DRM-Next in forming the early material that will ultimately come to the Linux 5.7 cycle in April.
Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their "VK Accelerators" on the platform.
New to Mesa 20.1-devel is a new option for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to enable zeroing out video memory allocations.
A set of patches that continue to be worked on for the Linux kernek is reconciling NUMA balancing decisions with the load balancer. Ultimately this series is about reducing unnecessary task and page migrations and other NUMA balancing overhead.
Last week I looked at the Windows vs. Linux scaling performance on the Threadripper 3990X at varying core/thread counts followed by looking at the Windows 10 performance against eight Linux distributions for this $3990 USD processor running within the System76 Thelio Major workstation. Now the tables have turned for our first look at this 64-core / 128-thread processor running on the BSDs, FreeBSD 12.1 in particular. With this article is looking at the FreeBSD 12.1 performance and seeing how the performance scales compared to Ubuntu 20.04 Linux and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 based CentOS Stream.
GNOME Shell and Mutter saw a set of patches land today for GNOME 3.36 that have been around for a few months and deal with the tracking of software rendering and VNC usage where GNOME Shell should in turn disable animations to ease the rendering workload.
While web-based GUIs for system management on server platforms with BMCs is far from anything new, Raptor Computing Systems with their libre POWER9 systems does now have a full-functioning web-based solution for their OpenBMC-powered systems and still being fully open-source.
We are learning more about the media engine capabilities with the forthcoming Intel "Gen12" (Xe) Tiger Lake graphics.
For those still running the AMD "Stoney Ridge" mobile APUs from 2016 that were launched aside Bristol Ridge with Excavator-based CPU cores and GCN 1.2 graphics, the Linux kernel has a fix finally for flickering issues when driving a 4K display off the APU.
It was not even two full weeks ago that Rav1e 0.3 was released with speed optimizations and other AV1 encoding enhancements while released on Tuesday was Rav1e 0.3.1 with a change to boost encode speeds at lower levels.
As written about last week, in the works for the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring is open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" acceleration for the GeForce 16 series. That code is currently sitting in the Nouveau development tree until landing in DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has now posted the necessary firmware binaries needed for enabling the hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.
Mesa 20.0 is now released as the first quarter 2020 update to the Mesa 3D open-source graphics driver stack.
Added to the LLVM source tree today is mlir-vulkan-runner as a new utility for testing with some interesting possibilities.
Google has made their first public developer preview release of the forthcoming Android 11.
While GNOME 3.36 will be released in just a few weeks, GNOME 3.34.4 is out today as the latest stable update in the current series.
With the release of Mesa 20.0 being imminent, here is a look at all of the new features for this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D stack for open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
Oracle today has released Solaris 11.4 SRU18 as the newest version of the long-running Solaris 11.4 series.
AMD has expanded their 7002 series "Rome" family with the availability today of the EPYC 7662 as their latest 64-core / 128-thread offering and the EPYC 7532 as a new 32-core part but with a full 256MB cache to offer more per-core L3 cache than other 32-core processors.
Landing last November in the LibreOffice development code was Skia drawing support to replace Cairo and in turn that opens up for Vulkan rendering of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.
With C++20 now being deemed complete from the recent ISO C++ meeting in Prague, the GNU Compiler Collection went ahead and added the -std=c++20 flag where as up until that change this weekend relied upon the -std=c++2a switch. LLVM's Clang compiler now has similar treatment on its codebase.
Added to the Vulkan API last summer was VK_EXT_line_rasterization for line rasterization like employed by CAD applications. The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is now supporting this extension.
Longtime Linux kernel developer David Howells of Red Hat sent out his latest patch revision exposing new capabilities for exposing more VFS and mount information to user-space along with notification support for any file-system mount topology changes.
It has been one month and a few days since Intel first made public the need for graphics driver patching of Gen 7/7.5 graphics for older Ivybridge / Haswell hardware to fix a graphics hardware flaw. That vulnerability also affected the common Intel Gen9 graphics but there the mitigation was uneventful and quickly merged without causing any performance hit. But for Ivybridge/Haswell one month later the graphics driver mitigation for CVE-2019-14615 is still being addressed.
GNOME 3.35.91 is out today as the second beta ahead of next month's GNOME 3.36 desktop release.
With Python 2 having been end-of-life since the start of the year and Ubuntu 20.04 being a long-term support release, Ubuntu developers are working hard to ensure Python 2 isn't shipped as part of this next Ubuntu LTS release.
We are seeing more cloud providers now offering AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series processors with the latest being Google now offering the new N2D VM family in beta for their public cloud.
It's already been six years since the collapse of Calxeda as the first promising ARM server company. With that, the Linux kernel upstream developers are looking at dropping the Calxeda platform support.
The third and likely last test release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.4-Vestby is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs.
With a new patch series for the Linux kernel, memory access performance by one measurement can improve by 116% on a dual socket Intel server with Optane DC Persistent Memory.
More high-end audio gear is finally transitioning from Firewire to USB-C and one of these new high-end audio interfaces will be supported by the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring.
Intel's open-source ConnMan software for managing Internet connections on Linux particularly for embedded systems has seen a new release.
The release of LLVM 10.0 is now upon us with the second and last planned release candidate issued at the end of last week.
Issues with Fedora's 32-bit ARM Xfce desktop spin will no longer be treated as a release blocker for the Linux distribution but instead the Fedora Workstation for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) will be considered a blocking issue.