More Vulkan NCNN Inference Benchmarks On AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce Under Linux Given the interest from the RealSR-NCNN Vulkan benchmarks on various NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at this neural network inference framework with the task of upscaling an image by 4x the resolution using RealSR, here are some more benchmarks of the NCNN framework accelerated by Vulkan on different GPUs under Ubuntu Linux. 3 Hours Ago - Vulkan - NCNN Vulkan

Independent Developers Tackling Snapdragon 630/660 SoC Support For The Upstream Linux Kernel Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers. 10 Hours Ago - Hardware - SDM630 / SDM660

26 September

KWinFT Projects Hit Beta Ahead Of Stable Releases Aligned With KDE Plasma 5.20 KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin focused on better Wayland support and other modernization efforts is approaching its first stable release next month around the same time as KDE Plasma 5.20. 26 September 08:31 PM EDT - KDE - KWinFT Beta

Warzone 2100 Lands Vulkan Renderer, Adaptive V-Sync For 20+ Year Old Game Warzone 2100 as the real-time strategy/tactics game that first premiered in 1999 before becoming open-source in 2004 and then fully open-source with game data in 2008 is now evolving in 2020 with Vulkan graphics support. 26 September 12:48 PM EDT - Linux Gaming - Plus OpenGL ES

Debian 10.6 Released With Many Security & Bug Fixes While Debian 11 "Bullseye" is on the way for release next year, Debian 10.6 "Buster" is out this weekend as the latest stable installment for this GNU/Linux distribution. 26 September 10:47 AM EDT - Debian - Debian 10.6

Mesa 20.3 Can Now Consume SPIR-V Binaries Generated By LLVM's libclc Microsoft's work on Mesa continues with a Microsoft engineer reviving earlier work carried out by David Airlie for allowing SPIR-V binaries produced by LLVM's libclc library to work with Mesa OpenCL. 26 September 10:02 AM EDT - Microsoft - Mesa 20.3 libclc SPIR-V

KDE Plasma 5.20 Should Be Crashing A Lot Less Under Wayland Following the recent Plasma 5.20 beta release, KDE developers have been landing many fixes for the Plasma 5.20 desktop ahead of its official release in October. 26 September 06:24 AM EDT - KDE - Wayland Fixes

Apple Open-Sources Swift System, Adds Linux Support Earlier this year Apple engineers announced Swift System as their new library for low-level system interfaces. They have now open-sourced Swift System while also introducing Linux support. 26 September 12:00 AM EDT - Programming - Swift System

25 September

NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Vulkan Neural Network Performance With NCNN With having added Tencent's NCNN tests to the Phoronix Test Suite with Vulkan acceleration, here is a look at the real-world impact by using RealSR-NCNN for scaling up with RealSR. Various NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested for this initial NCNN / RealSR-NCNN Vulkan comparison. 25 September 02:35 PM EDT - Display Drivers

Firefox Nightly Flips On New JIT "Warp" Code For Greater JavaScript Performance Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine team have been working on a big update to their just-in-time compiler code. This big update called "Warp" is now enabled in the latest Firefox Nightly builds for offering big speed-ups. 25 September 01:33 PM EDT - Mozilla - JIT WarpBuilder

Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org Now Has 600 Different Tests/Benchmarks Ahead of next month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, the milestone was met this week of having 600 different test profiles (benchmarks) available for automated execution via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software. 25 September 10:30 AM EDT - Phoronix Test Suite - 600 And Counting

Trenchboot Secure Launch Support For Linux Sees New Patches For a while now Oracle engineers and others have been working on Trenchboot as a means of secure launch/boot support when paired with the likes of Intel TXT and AMD SKINIT for trusted execution and configuring each piece of the software boot chain for trusted/secure handling. The latest kernel patches have been sent out for review for secure launching of the kernel. 25 September 06:56 AM EDT - Linux Security - Trenchboot

GraalPHP Is A PHP JIT Implementation Built On GraalVM Oracle's GraalVM has seen language support well outside of Java/OpenJDK from Ruby to WebAssembly to R and Python. The newest language seeing an experimental implementation built atop GraalVM is PHP. 25 September 06:26 AM EDT - Programming - GraalPHP

Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan With Unigine Heaven Seeing Improved Performance Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available. 25 September 03:56 AM EDT - Vulkan - Zink + Heaven

Fedora 33 Beta To Be Released Next Week After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week. 25 September 12:09 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora 33

24 September

Intel DG1 Sound Support Coming For Linux 5.10 Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10. 24 September 08:41 PM EDT - Intel - DG1 Audio With Linux 5.10

AMD Is Hiring To Work On New Radeon Driver Tooling Written In Rust It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling. 24 September 05:07 PM EDT - Radeon - Radeon Rust

AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT CPUFreq Governor Comparison With Linux 5.9 One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil. 24 September 02:36 PM EDT - Software

Linux 5.10 To Support Nitro Enclaves For Security-Critical Applications The kernel support for Nitro Enclaves landed this week in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month. 24 September 01:42 PM EDT - Linux Security - Nitro Enclaves

Arm Begins Bringing Up Neoverse N2, Neoverse V1 Support In The GNU Toolchain It was just a few days ago that Arm outlined the Neoverse N2 "Perseus" design as a follow-on to the Neoverse N1 and coming concurrently to the next-generation Cortex-A. Now the company has already jumped on beginning their open-source/Linux enablement work around the Neoverse N2. 24 September 01:15 PM EDT - Arm - Neoverse N2 + GAS

PostgreSQL 13 Released With Performance Improvements PostgreSQL 13.0 is out this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used relational database server. 24 September 10:10 AM EDT - Free Software - PostgreSQL 13

DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 Released With Numerous Fixes DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 is out today as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system. 24 September 09:59 AM EDT - BSD - DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2

Intel Engineers Begin Landing Open-Source Support For TDX, Intel Key Locker Last month Intel published a whitepaper on TDX as Trust Domain Extensions as a means of better securing virtual machines. TDX allows for isolating VMs from the hypervisor and other non-VMM system software. Intel TDX builds off other recent work around MKTME memory encryption and other features. We are now beginning to see that software side support roll-out along with the also-new Key Locker instructions. 24 September 06:47 AM EDT - Intel - Trust Domain Extensions

HPE Preparing SGI UV5 Support For The Linux Kernel Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support. 24 September 03:50 AM EDT - Hardware - HPE UV5

Fedora 34 Aims To Further Enhance Security But Will Lose Runtime Disabling Of SELinux Currently on Fedora the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality that's there by default can be disabled at run-time via the /etc/selinux/config but moving forward with Fedora 34 they are looking at removing that support and focusing just on disabling via selinux=0 at the kernel boot time in order to provide greater security. 24 September 12:07 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora 34 + SELinux Hardening

23 September

Disman Continues Taking Shape As Display Management Library For X11/Wayland Disman is the display management library forked from LibKScreen as part of KWinFT. Last week at XDC2020 an update was provided on this Qt/C++ library for display management. 23 September 08:31 PM EDT - KDE - Disman

Intel Announces Atom x6000E Series "Elkhart Lake", 11th Gen Core Tigerlake-UP3 After talking about Elkhart Lake for months in terms of the Linux patches bringing up this next-generation Intel processor, Intel is announcing it today in the form of the Atom x6000E series. Additionally, following the recent Tiger Lake client processor launch, 11th Gen Core Tigerlake-UP3 has also been announced. 23 September 09:00 AM EDT - Processors