Mesa's Vulkan Software Implementation Now Known as Lavapipe Mesa's Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3. 1 Minute Ago - Vulkan - Lavapipe

Systemd Startup For KDE Plasma 5.21 Has Helped Uncover Bugs, Other Improvements While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs. 52 Minutes Ago - KDE - Optional Systemd

Linux 5.9 Regression, NVIDIA RTX 30, GNOME 40 & Microsoft Made For A Fun September From new hardware releases to figuring out that Linux 5.9 performance regression to interesting open-source software advancements, September was an interesting trek with 259 original articles on the site and another 15 featured articles / multi-page Linux hardware reviews. 68 Minutes Ago - Phoronix - September 2020 Highlights

Intel Releases OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0 Following yesterday's release of the finalized OpenCL 3.0 specification, open-source Intel developers have released OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0. 90 Minutes Ago - Intel - OpenCL-Intercept-Layer

AMDGPU Gets A Big Batch Of Fixes For Its New Driver Code Coming In Linux 5.10 In addition to the last minute AMDGPU fixes for Linux 5.9 that include work on the RDNA2 new GPU support and promoting Navi 12 out of the experimental status, an initial batch of fixes for AMDGPU were also sent in to DRM-Next on Wednesday in addressing early fallout from the new feature code slated for Linux 5.10. 5 Hours Ago - Radeon - AMDGPU

Fedora 33 To Stick With systemd-resolved Following Last Minute Concerns One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release. 7 Hours Ago - Fedora - F33 + systemd-resolved

30 September

Linux 5.9 Gets More Fixes For AMD RDNA2 GPUs, Promotes Navi 12 A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering. 30 September 02:27 PM EDT - Radeon - Navi 12 Not Experimental

Benchmarking Firefox 83 Nightly With "Warp" Against Google Chrome On Linux Following last week's news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT "Warp" update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux. 30 September 01:25 PM EDT - Software

Intel Media Driver 2020.3 Released With Gen12 AV1 Decode, Other Improvements Just in time for the end of the quarter Intel's open-source multimedia team has released the Media Driver 2020.3 package for the Intel graphics accelerated media encode/decode component on Linux platforms. 30 September 11:07 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Media Driver 2020.03

OpenCL 3.0 Specification Released With New Khronos Open-Source OpenCL SDK Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK. 30 September 09:11 AM EDT - Standards - OpenCL 3.0

Intel Sends Out Latest DG1 Linux Patches But Won't Hit Until At Least The 5.11 Kernel The sixth spin of Intel DG1 discrete graphics card patches have now been sent out for review, amounting to just about 700 lines of new driver code due to building off the existing DG1 work and more broadly the Gen12/Xe support that's been refined in mainline for months. With these patches it would appear the Intel DG1 is then in good shape under Linux but due to the timing is unlikely to be mainlined until a stable kernel release in early 2021. 30 September 08:42 AM EDT - Intel - Linux 5.11

Intel Key Locker Support Added To LLVM - Confirms Presence With Tiger Lake Last week on the GNU toolchain side was initial work on supporting Intel Key Locker while this week Key Locker support has come to LLVM. 30 September 07:00 AM EDT - Intel - Intel Key Locker + LLVM

NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver Moves To 455 Series For Linux NVIDIA's Linux Vulkan beta driver build has moved from the 450 series that it's been on for a while to the current 455 branch. 30 September 06:38 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 455.22.04

NVIDIA Sends Out Latest Linux Kernel Patches For 1GB THP To Help Boost Performance NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan sent out on Monday his latest "1GB PUD THP" patches in aiming to boost application performance on Linux for software making use of large amounts of RAM. 30 September 03:00 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - 1GB PUD THP

Mediatek MT76 WiFi Driver Seeing Nice Improvements For Linux 5.10 For those making use of the "MT76" WiFi driver for Mediatek MT76 series wireless support, the Linux 5.10 kernel should be a nice upgrade. 30 September 12:09 AM EDT - Linux Networking - MT76 Wireless

29 September

Intel mOS, Torvalds Commentary, Intel Gen12 Graphics, Zen 2 "XT" CPUs Topped Q3 As we approach the end of Q3'2020 there have been 783 original news articles on Phoronix this quarter and another 40 featured reviews / multi-page articles. Here is a look back at what's been keeping readers informed during this turbulent year. 29 September 08:47 PM EDT - Phoronix - Q3-2020

Intel Has Been Working On OpenCL C 3.0 Support For Clang Intel's compiler experts in Moscow have been working on OpenCL C 3.0 support for the LLVM Clang compiler front-end. 29 September 05:26 PM EDT - Intel - OpenCL C 3.0 For Clang

Mali G72 Now Supported By Open-Source Panfrost Gallium3D Driver The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU. 29 September 01:14 PM EDT - Mesa - Panfrost + Mali G72

Initial Fedora 32 vs. Fedora 33 Beta Benchmarks Point To Slightly Higher Performance In addition to Fedora Workstation 33 switching to Btrfs, there are a number of key components updated in Fedora 33 as well as finally enabling link-time optimizations (LTO) for package builds that make this next Fedora Linux installment quite interesting from a performance perspective. Here are some initial benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 32 against the Fedora Workstation 33 Beta on an Intel Core i9 10900K system. 29 September 11:00 AM EDT - Operating Systems

Fedora 33 Beta Released With Big Changes From LTO To Btrfs The beta of Fedora 33 is available this morning ahead of the official release expected at the end of October for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. 29 September 09:40 AM EDT - Fedora - Fedora 33

Intel's oneAPI Is Coming To AMD Radeon GPUs While yesterday brought the release of Intel's oneAPI 1.0 specification, the interesting news today is that oneAPI support is coming to AMD Radeon graphics cards. 29 September 09:00 AM EDT - Radeon - oneAPI + Radeon GPUs

NetBSD Has Some Wayland Support But X11 Is Far More Mature Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don't jump on the Wayland bandwagon. 29 September 07:46 AM EDT - Wayland - NetBSD + Wayland

MoltenVK 1.1 Update Brings Big Improvements For Vulkan On macOS MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API. 29 September 06:41 AM EDT - Vulkan - MoltenVK 1.1

Mesa 20.2 Released With RADV ACO By Default, Initial RDNA2 Graphics Support Mesa 20.2 has managed to release just before the end of the the quarter. This Mesa Q3'2020 graphics driver update is coming out about one month behind schedule but the wait is worthwhile given many open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver updates. 29 September 06:25 AM EDT - Mesa - Mesa 20.2

Mir 2.1 Released With Some New Protocol Support, Many Fixes Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical's project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features. 29 September 03:02 AM EDT - Ubuntu - Mir 2.1

Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 68000 Series Support In LLVM Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old. 29 September 12:02 AM EDT - LLVM - M68k

28 September

Red Hat's Stratis 2.2 Linux Storage Solution Released A new version of Stratis is ready to go as Red Hat's open-source storage solution built atop LVM and XFS for offering easy and modern local storage management on Linux systems that aim to rival the likes of Btrfs and ZFS but without having to rely on a new file-system. 28 September 08:29 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Stratis 2.2

Micron Looks To Upstream Their Media Pool "Mpool" Object Storage To The Linux Kernel Micron's Mpool is at the heart of their HSE Open-Source Storage Engine in providing an object storage media pool built atop block storage devices. Micron engineers are now looking at possibly having Mpool upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel. 28 September 02:40 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Micron Mpool

Intel oneAPI 1.0 Officially Released After announcing oneAPI at the end of 2018 and then going into beta last year, oneAPI 1.0 is now official for this open-source, standards-based unified programming model designed to support Intel's range of hardware from CPUs to GPUs to other accelerators like FPGAs. Intel's oneAPI initiative has been one of several exciting software efforts led by the company in recent years while continuing to serve as one of the world's largest contributors to open-source software. 28 September 01:00 PM EDT - Software

AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 Vulkan Driver Brings Several Fixes AMD driver developers today released AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 as their latest open-source snapshot of their official Vulkan graphics driver. 28 September 08:40 AM EDT - Radeon - AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6

LVFS/Fwupd Serve More Than 20 Million Firmware Downloads For Upgrades On Linux It was just earlier this summer that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) crossed 17 million firmware downloads while today the Linux hardware community is celebrating that already surpassing 20 million downloads! 28 September 07:45 AM EDT - Hardware - LVFS

NetBSD Changes Its Default X11 Window Manager After Two Decades It's 2020 and NetBSD has changed its default X11 window manager after more than two decades with TWM. 28 September 07:00 AM EDT - BSD - CTWM

OpenSSH 8.4 Brings Better Support For FIDO/2FA Keys Version 8.4 of OpenSSH has been released and among its wide assortment of changes is a lot of continued work on FIDO/2FA key handling. 28 September 06:41 AM EDT - BSD - OpenSSH 8.4

Vulkan 1.2.155 Released With EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64 Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs. 28 September 06:27 AM EDT - Vulkan - EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64

MSM Adreno DRM Driver For Linux 5.10 Has DisplayPort, Per-Process Pagetables Rob Clark who founded the Freedreno/MSM driver project and current Googler sent in the MSM direct rendering manager driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.10 merge window. This time around the Adreno kernel graphics/display driver has some notable additions. 28 September 12:23 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - MSM DRM

27 September

Linux 5.9 Stable Expected In Two Weeks, But For Now Is Linux 5.9-rc7 Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.9-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for Linux 5.9. Due to the regressions encountered this cycle and prominent issues being resolved late, he's looking at releasing Linux 5.9 in two weeks time rather than next week. 27 September 06:22 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - Linux 5.9

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. 27 September 01:27 PM EDT - 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. 27 September 06:44 AM EDT - Hardware - SDM630 / SDM660