Oracle To Stick With Solaris "11.4" For Continuous Delivery SRU Releases With no new indications of Solaris 12 or Solaris 11.next and given the past layoffs and previous announcements from Oracle, today's statement that Solaris 11.4 will remain as their continuous delivery model with monthly SRU releases come as little surprise. 18 Minutes Ago - Oracle - Little Surprise

New OpenBenchmarking.org Features Enhance Discovering Popular + Reliable Tests As part of the new OpenBenchmarking.org being developed as part of Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 due out next quarter, some new features were deployed live on OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend. 98 Minutes Ago - Phoronix Test Suite - OpenBenchmarking.org

Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 Now Shipping For Expanding Vulkan's Reach The Vulkan Portability Extension (VK_KHR_portability_subset) has been released as part of the effort by The Khronos Group in getting Vulkan running on as many platforms as possible, including the likes of Apple macOS/iOS. 4 Hours Ago - Vulkan - Vulkan Portability

Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry Appears Destined For Linux 5.10 As first outlined earlier this year, Intel has been working on the Linux support for Platform Monitoring Technology as a new hardware telemetry feature first introduced with new Tigerlake hardware. It's looking like the initial Intel PMT support will come with Linux 5.10 while further work is being prepared that builds off its foundation. 5 Hours Ago - Intel - Intel PMT

Open-Source Vivante Driver In Some Cases Outperforming Proprietary Driver One of the less talked about open-source graphics drivers talked about is Etnaviv as the reverse-engineered, community-based driver providing OpenGL/GLES support for Vivante graphics IP. While it's still working towards OpenGL ES 3.0 compliance, its performance is currently in some cases competitive -- and even outperforming -- the Vivante proprietary driver. 5 Hours Ago - Mesa - Etnaviv 2020

Unity 2020.2 Bringing Some Hefty Performance Optimizations Not only did Unity Software experience a successful IPO last week but they also rolled out the Unity 2020.2 engine into public beta and with that comes some "major speed-ups" for performance. 5 Hours Ago - Linux Gaming - Unity 2020.2 Beta

Experiments Are Underway With Vulkan Powering The KDE Plasma Shell Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications. 7 Hours Ago - KDE - Vulkan + Plasma Shell

POWER Coregroup Support Coming With Linux 5.10 There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel. 7 Hours Ago - Hardware - Coregroup

20 September

Linux 5.10 Adding Support For AMD Zen 3 CPU Temperature Monitoring The next version of the Linux kernel will allow monitoring temperatures of the upcoming AMD Zen 3 processors. 20 September 05:31 PM EDT - AMD - Zen 3 k10temp

FFmpeg Now Supports GPU Inference With Intel's OpenVINO Earlier this summer Intel engineers added an OpenVINO back-end to the FFmpeg multimedia framework. OpenVINO as a toolkit for optimized neural network performance on Intel hardware was added to FFmpeg for the same reasons there is TensorFlow and others also supported -- support for DNN-based video filters and other deep learning processing. 20 September 09:41 AM EDT - Multimedia - OpenVINO GPU

OpenPOWER Summit 2020 Was This Week With Many Interesting Hardware/Software Talks In addition to XDC2020 this past week, the Linux Foundation hosted the virtual OpenPOWER Summit North America 2020 event as well with a mix of interesting hardware and software presentations. 20 September 09:17 AM EDT - Linux Events - OpenPOWER

Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor Making Progress On Booting Windows The Cloud-Hypervisor project that is led by Intel open-source folks for providing a cloud-focused hypervisor written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release. 20 September 02:50 AM EDT - Intel - Cloud-Hypervisor 0.10

RenderDoc 1.10 Released For This Leading Cross-Platform Graphics Debugger RenderDoc 1.10 was released on Friday for this leading open-source program supporting frame-capture-based debugging on Vulkan, OpenGL / GLES, and Direct3D across Windows, Linux, and Android along with platforms like Stadia and the Nintendo Switch. 20 September 12:04 AM EDT - Programming - RenderDoc 1.10

19 September

AMDGPU TMZ + HDCP Should Allow Widevine DRM To Behave Nicely With AMD Linux Systems Coming together this year for the mainline Linux kernel was the AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) capability for encrypted video memory support with Radeon GPUs. This topic was talked about at this week's XDC2020 conference. 19 September 03:15 PM EDT - Radeon - TMZ + HDCP

Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Seeing Some 50~100% FPS Gains After working on getting the Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan driver up to OpenGL 4.6 with still pending patches, former Samsung OSG engineer Mike Blumenkrantz has been making remarkable progress on the performance aspect as well. 19 September 10:45 AM EDT - Mesa - Zink Gallium3D Performance

Intel Compute Runtime 20.37.17906 Brings Rocket Lake Support Intel's software team has released a new version of their Compute Runtime that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities for their graphics hardware on Linux. 19 September 07:00 AM EDT - Intel - OpenCL + Level Zero

KDE Plasma 5.21 Bringing Systemd Startup Support, Wayland Improvements KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries characterized this week as "the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week!" 19 September 06:35 AM EDT - KDE - Exciting Week

NVIDIA C++ Standard Library Now Available Via GitHub Introduced last year as part of CUDA 10.2 was libcu++ as the CUDA C++ standard library, which works with not only NVIDIA CUDA enabled configurations but also CPUs. The libcu++ sources are now available via GitHub. 19 September 05:06 AM EDT - NVIDIA - libcu++

Sculpt OS 20.08 Released With Redesigned GUI Stack Building off the recent Genode OS 20.08 operating system framework release is now Sculpt OS 20.08 as the open-source project's general purpose operating system attempt. 19 September 02:41 AM EDT - Operating Systems - Sculpt OS 20.08

FreeBSD 12.2 BETA2 Brings TRIM For Bhyve's VirtIO-BLK, Intel ICE Added The second beta of the forthcoming FreeBSD 12.2 is now available with a fair number of prominent changes accumulating over the past week. 19 September 12:08 AM EDT - BSD - FreeBSD 12.2

18 September

OpenZFS 2.0-RC2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes Nearly one month ago OpenZFS 2.0 saw its first release candidate while now it's been succeeded by another test candidate in time for some weekend exposure. 18 September 06:45 PM EDT - Linux Storage - OpenZFS 2.0

Intel Submits More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 5.10 Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday. 18 September 03:53 PM EDT - Intel - Linux 5.10 Intel Graphics

Libre-SOC Still Persevering To Be A Hybrid CPU/GPU That's 100% Open-Source The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding. 18 September 12:26 PM EDT - Hardware - Libre-SOC

X.Org Is Getting Their Cloud / Continuous Integration Costs Under Control You may recall from earlier this year that the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud costs were growing out of control primarily due to their continuous integration setup. They were seeking sponsorships to help out with these costs but ultimately they've attracted new sponsors while also better configuring/optimizing their CI configuration in order to get those costs back at more manageable levels. 18 September 09:33 AM EDT - X.Org - Expensive Cloud

Linux 5.10 To Support AMD SME Hardware-Enforced Cache Coherency Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). 18 September 07:18 AM EDT - AMD - AMD SME

New /dev/random Implementation Hits 35th Revision Going on for more than four years now has been creating a new /dev/random implementation and this Friday marks the 35th revision to this big set of patches that aim for better performance and security. 18 September 06:39 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - LRNG /dev/random

Etnaviv Gallium3D Adds On-Disk Shader Cache Support Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache. 18 September 06:24 AM EDT - Mesa - Etnaviv Shader Cache

Taiwins 0.2 Released As Modular Wayland Compositor That Supports Lua Scripting Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release. 18 September 12:02 AM EDT - Wayland - Taiwins 0.2

17 September

V3DV Developers Lay Out Plans For Upstreaming The Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Driver In Mesa Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa. 17 September 08:38 PM EDT - Mesa - Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan

Linux 5.9 To Allow Controlling Page Lock Unfairness In Addressing Performance Regression Following the Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarks on AMD EPYC and it showing the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel regressing in some workloads, bisecting that issue, and that bringing up the issue of the performance regression over page lock fairness a solution for Linux 5.9 has now landed. 17 September 04:14 PM EDT - Software

Cache Creator Tool Proposed For AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Google engineer Steven Perron has laid out their proposal for an XGL cache creator tool for AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK. 17 September 12:55 PM EDT - Radeon - XGL Cache Creator

KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop. 17 September 11:10 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 5.20

NVIDIA 455.23.04 Linux Beta Released With GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Support NVIDIA has once again managed to provide launch-day Linux driver support for their next-generation graphics processors. Today the NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta driver is shipping for Linux support with the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards. 17 September 09:42 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 455.23.04

RADV's "ACO" Shader Backend Still Pursuing RadeonSI, Early Work On RDNA 2 Valve developer Timur Kristóf who has been spending the past year working on the AMD Compiler "ACO" back-end for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" as well as beginning to port this shader compiler back-end to RadeonSI Gallium3D. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has made incredible progress over the past year -- enough so that it's been the default for Mesa's RADV driver. During XDC2020 Day 2, Timur provided an update on ACO. 17 September 09:09 AM EDT - Radeon - ACO TODO 2020

Intel Releases HAXM 7.6.5 Execution Manager Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs. 17 September 06:56 AM EDT - Intel - Intel HAXM

Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day. 17 September 02:30 AM EDT - X.Org - XDC 2020 + Microsoft