Released for GDC/GTC week was Nsight Graphics 2019.2, the proprietary cross-platform, closed-source utility tool for debugging, profiling, and analyzing Direct3D, OpenGL, and other GPU-accelerated APIs.
For those with a PRIME style notebook or just making use of dual/multiple graphics processors in your system, Primus-VK allows for using a secondary/dedicated GPU for rendering while driving the display from the alternative (often integrated graphics) GPU. Primus-VK is implemented as a Vulkan layer as a clean approach for dealing with multiple GPUs in a Vulkan world.
A few weeks back I wrote about Xilinx looking at contributing their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers to the mainline Linux kernel. They are continuing to work on that goal and pushed out their latest kernel driver patches this week for these Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.
While the Linux 5.0 kernel brought initial support for the long-awaited open-source FreeSync implementation, the Linux 5.2 kernel coming out this summer will likely have additional improvements.
Python 2 support will formally reach end-of-life on 1 January 2020 and Fedora 31 is preparing for that by working to drop packages (or parts of packages) that depend upon Python 2.
OpenArena, one of the most well known open-source games built atop the ioquake3 engine of what started out as id Tech 3, has now seen an independent port to the Vulkan graphics API.
Released at the start of February was the big Lutris 0.5 release with an enhanced GTK interface, GOG.com support, and much more for this open-source gaming platform. Lutris 0.5.1 is now available with some much needed fixes.
Google engineers are ending out their work week by issuing the beta of Chrome 74.
The Fedora 30 Beta was anticipated for release next Tuesday after having been under a beta freeze since 5 March, but that's not going to happen and now they are hoping to ship in early April.
Given the recent releases of Chrome 73 and Firefox 66, here are some fresh tests of these latest browsers on Linux under a variety of popular browser benchmarks.
With many AMD driver developers being over in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, this week AMDVLK saw rather small changes for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.
WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.
Maxim Levitsky of Red Hat sent out a "request for comments" patch series this week introducing NVMe VFIO media storage device support for the Linux kernel.
GNU Parallel is a tool for carrying out multiple commands/jobs in parallel on one or more computers. Out today is the GNU Parallel 20190322 release with a few changes over last month's update.
The latest open-source game engine project working to re-implement a legendary commercial game is DevilutionX. This new effort is an open-source re-implementation of Blizzard's Diablo game from 1996 while now working on Linux and other operating systems nicely.
Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced the release of libinput 1.13 Release Candidate 2 on Thursday as the newest test release for this input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland Linux systems.
While the release of GCC 9 (v9.1) is just a few weeks away, a late addition to this annual compiler collection update is its C++ standard library now having a C++17 parallel algorithms implementation thanks to Intel developers.
The Free Software Foundation has announced the latest batch of hardware it has certified for "Respecting Your Freedom" as part of its RYF program.
Software releases are aplenty for GDC week and NVIDIA's latest release is their newest post-4.0 PhysX SDK.
CodeWeavers, the main sponsor/contributor to the Wine project, announced the release today of their commercial CrossOver 18.5 software for more easily running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS.
If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.
Merged this morning into the systemd code-base was a big feature addition that's been in the works for the better part of one year by Lennart Poettering and other developers.
While Intel was building up anticipation for their Xe Graphics dedicated hardware last night in San Francisco with their inaugural "Odyssey" event, quietly hitting the Intel servers is an architecture overview for their Icelake "Gen 11" graphics.
OpenShot 2.4.4 is the latest update to this long advancing open-source non-linear video editing solution that competes with the likes of Kdenlive and Shotcut.
Wayland release manager Derek Foreman has officially announced the release of Wayland 1.17, the first official update since last August.
Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver may now see slightly better performance in some scenarios thanks to fast color clears support having landed.
The "WineVulkan" code within Wine for exposing the Vulkan API to Windows games/applications now supports the requirements to last year's Vulkan 1.1 base specification.
Out for GDC week is the NVIDIA 418.56 Linux driver as the latest stable update to their current long-lived driver release branch.
The performance out of Intel's SVT video encoders for offering great CPU-based video encoding performance for the likes of HEVC / AV1 / VP9 continues maturing quite nicely. Since discovering Intel's open-source work at the start of February and benchmarking it several times since, its performance has continued to improve particularly for the SVT-AV1 encoder.
Last week NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX 1660 as the newest RTX-less Turing GPU but costing only $219+ USD. The GTX 1660 is a further trimmed down version of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti that launched several weeks prior. After picking up an ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Phoenix Edition, here are Linux OpenGL/Vulkan gaming benchmarks compared to a wide assortment of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Ubuntu.
AMD has launched a new version of its open-source Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) software under the GPUOpen umbrella.
After being delayed the better part of one month, LLVM 8.0 officially set sail this morning.
For about one week already Intel's rolling-release Clear Linux distribution has been shipping with GNOME 3.32. Here are some quick graphics and gaming benchmarks comparing GNOME 3.30.2 to 3.32.0.
For those using Samba as the open-source re-implementation of SMB/CIFS and allowing for file/print sharing with Microsoft Windows systems, Samba 4.10 is now available as the project's latest feature release.
With the core functionality for Intel Icelake CPUs appearing to be in place, Intel's open-source developers have been working on the other areas of hardware enablement for these next-generation processors.
While Vulkan 1.1.104 was just released on Sunday with new extensions ahead of this week's Game Developers Conference, today marks the availability of Vulkan 1.1.105 with new extensions for the "Google Games Platform", a.k.a. their just announced Stadia cloud game streaming platform.
Greenfield is the nearly two year old effort providing an in-browser, HTML5 Wayland compositor. This open-source project has allowed for remote Wayland applications to run in browsers while running from remote hosts. Greenfield though can now run applications directly inside a user's web browser via Web Worker threads.
Radeon DDX wrangler Michel Dänzer of AMD has announced the releases today of xf86-video-amdgpu 19.0.1 and the xf86-video-ati 19.0.1 release for older Radeon hardware.
Last week during Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, some interesting details were revealed by Intel and their work on this open-source hardware initialization effort alternative to proprietary BIOS/firmware.
Google used the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 2019) to officially unveil "Stadia" as their cloud-based game streaming service formerly known as Project Stream.
The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has a series of patches pending for introducing VK_KHR_8bit_storage support.
One of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs.
Mozilla this morning released Firefox 66.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser.
The first beta of the Qt 5.13 tool-kit update is now available for testing. The Qt Company still hopes to ship Qt 5.13.0 in May and for that to happen they will be issuing multiple betas until they are ready for the release candidate phase.
Orbital is an open-source project providing a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator that is still in its early stages but what interests us is its technical details including the use of Vulkan/SPIR-V.
SiFive has announced an upgraded Freedom Everywhere SoC as well as the HiFive1 Revision B developer board using this FE310-G002 SoC.
While NetBSD has more than a half-dozen tier-one supported architectures and dozens more of tier two ports, DragonFlyBSD has been largely centered on x86_64 since their dropping of 32-bit x86 a while ago. Arm has largely remained off their radar but there seems to be some growing interest around seeing DragonFlyBSD on AArch64.
For demonstrating the many use-cases around the $99 Jetson Nano that was announced on Monday, NVIDIA engineers devised an open-source robot that you can build yourself with mostly 3D printed parts and by default is geared to run on Ubuntu Linux.