Over the years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has resulted in some really great projects in the X.Org ecosystem from work in the early days on the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack to VKMS more recently to many other improvements especially as it pertains to open-source graphics drivers / Mesa. But for Google Summer of Code 2021 at least, the organization will not be participating…

Source: Phoronix – X.Org Foundation Bows Out For Google Summer of Code 2021

With plans of formally releasing FreeBSD 13.0 at month’s end, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 is available this weekend and on-schedule for helping to test and evaluate this forthcoming major BSD operating system update…

Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 Released With TCP Performance Improvement, Other Fixes

KDE developers have been off to a busy March so far with working on adaptive panel opacity support for Plasma 5.22. Another pleasant improvement with that next Plasma release is to avoid rendering work when the screen is off…

Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 5.22 Adds Adaptive Opacity + Will Avoid Useless Rendering When Screen Is Off

Released this week was Intel’s open-source oneAPI Level Zero v1.2.3 for the headers and loader based on their public oneAPI Level Zero specification…

Source: Phoronix – oneAPI Level Zero 1.2.3 Released For Intel’s Low-Level Interface

The LABWC Wayland compositor advertises itself as an Openbox alternative and just saw its inaugural release…

Source: Phoronix – LABWC Is The Newest Stacking Wayland Compositor

Disclosed by Arm last summer was the Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability and they were quick to introduce new safeguards against SLS in the GCC and LLVM compilers. The compiler-based mitigations to straight-line speculation involves adding speculation barrier sequences around the vulnerable instructions to prevent speculatively executing instructions around changes in control flow. While compiler developers were quick to add the options, so far the Linux kernel developers are in disagreement still over its importance and the proposed patches that would flip on this option when compiling the ARM Linux kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Linux Developers Continue Discussing “SLS” Mitigation For The Kernel

Exiv2, the widely-used C++ metadata library / tools for dealing with image metadata via EXIF / IPTC / XMP standards and ICC profiles is looking to join the KDE project…

Source: Phoronix – Exiv2 Looks To Team Up With The KDE Project

Following the recent promotions of DataSketches and ECharts, the Apache Software Foundation has promoted Daffodil as their newest top-level project. Apache Daffodil is an open-source universal interchange implementation of the Data Format Description Language (DFDL)…

Source: Phoronix – Daffodil Promoted To Being An Apache Top-Level Project

While Linus Torvalds long has released his new kernel releases — both release candidates and the inaugural stable releases — every Sunday, there are the occasional exceptions like this week with Linux 5.12-rc2 being issued on Friday night. The Linux 5.12-rc2 release has come early due to that nasty file-system corruption issue stemming from botched swapfile handling…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.12-rc2 Released Early – A Rare Friday Kernel Due To That Nasty Corruption Issue

When it comes to the AMDGPU kernel driver changes in Linux 5.12 for modern open-source AMD Radeon graphics, most notable is RDNA2 OverDrive overclocking support now being available as well as AMDGPU FreeSync over HDMI (pre-HDMI 2.1). But from initial testing the new in-development kernel is showing mostly subtle performance improvements for the Radeon RX 6800 series over Linux 5.11.

Source: Phoronix – Radeon RX 6800 Series Seeing Some Small Gains With Linux 5.12

PyTorch 1.8 was released on Thursday as the newest version of this widely-used machine learning library. Exciting many will be easier AMD Radeon ROCm support with Python wheels now provided for that Radeon Open eCosystem support…

Source: Phoronix – PyTorch 1.8 Released With AMD ROCm Binaries

Recently I wrapped up some tests looking at the Dell XPS Linux laptop with Core i7 1165G7 “Tiger Lake” processor when looking at the Linux kernel performance of 5.10 vs. 5.11 vs. 5.12 as well as the impact if upgrading to the Linux 5.12 kernel…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Tiger Lake Xe Graphics On Linux 5.12 Git, Mesa 21.1-devel

The next major NVIDIA driver series, the 470 release series, is slated to be “even more Wayland-friendly” but what all that encompasses remains to be seen…

Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA 470 Linux Driver Series To Be “Even More Wayland-Friendly”

Published last month was an updated but still experimental version of the native Wayland support for Wine after that code was originally published last year. One of the lingering questions has been around the prospects of mainlining this Wayland driver in Wine while last week the longtime Wine project leader, Alexandre Julliard, provided some clarity on the matter…

Source: Phoronix – Wine’s Project Leader Has Given A Blessing To The Wayland Effort

hipSYCL, the innovative implementation of Khronos’ SYCL for targeting CPUs and GPUs by integrating with existing toolchains, is seeing work on supporting Intel oneAPI Level Zero for running directly off Intel graphics hardware…

Source: Phoronix – hipSYCL Sees Work-In-Progress Support For Intel oneAPI Level Zero Backend

While it’s 2021 and many modern Linux gaming and other workloads are focusing on the Vulkan API, Intel isn’t letting up in their aggressive optimizations to their open-source “Iris” OpenGL Gallium3D driver for Linux systems. With the latest Mesa 21.1 code today there is a set of patches providing up to 17% better performance in some games while other OpenGL software is generally a few percent faster at least. In some micro-benchmarks it can be more than 50% faster…

Source: Phoronix – Even In 2021, Intel Squeezes Some Very Nice Performance Gains Out Of Their OpenGL Driver

Hector Martin, who has been working on the crowd-funded effort to bring Linux up on the Apple M1 SoC and the modern Apple devices using that in-house silicon, has sent out the third iteration of his kernel patches…

Source: Phoronix – Apple M1 Patches For The Linux Kernel Sent Out A Third Time

Linus Torvalds has now warned developers over using Linux 5.12-rc1 as a basis for their future branches and is looking to release 5.12-rc2 ahead of schedule as a result of that problematic file-system corruption bug stemming from a swap file bug…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.12-rc2 Likely Coming Early Due To That Nasty File-System Corruption Bug

Google has been delivering new Chrome milestone releases on a six week cycle for more than one decade while moving ahead they are shifting to a four-week cycle…

Source: Phoronix – Chrome Moving To A 4-Week Release Cycle

Qt 5.15.3 is out today with nearly 250 fixes as the latest point release for this last Qt5 long-term support series. However, as reported previously, new Qt 5.15 LTS point releases are restricted to The Qt Company’s commercial customers…

Source: Phoronix – Qt 5.15.3 LTS Released With 200+ Bug Fixes, But Only For Commercial Customers