Svobodný software

Building off the existing Linux support for GPU Direct RDMA / Peer-To-Peer DMA functionality, a set of patches were posted by NVIDIA today enabling this P2P DMA support to also work for device-private pages...

Back in March for GDC, Microsoft excitingly announced the official releases of Direct3D 12 Work Graphs for "enabling new types of GPU autonomy" for allowing more rendering work to be offloaded to the GPU. While this greater GPU-driven rendering with Work Graphs has been talked up by Microsoft and other parties, Valve engineers working on VKD3D-Proton for implementing D3D12 over Vulkan have found the new Work Graphs functionality to not be as nearly captivating...

Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders -- both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds...

Last week when launching the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors, on the same day AOCC 5.0 was quietly released as the newest version of AMD's Zen-focused compiler derived from LLVM/Clang. With not only adding AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support but also additional vectorization improvements and other performance optimizations, I was eager to run some benchmarks of AOCC 5.0 against the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers. Here are those initial benchmarks using dual AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 processors.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 24.10, today Canonical announced a developer preview of an Ubuntu 24.10 Linux build targeting Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops...

LLVM's modern Fortran compiler "flang-new" has now been renamed to "flang" for next year's LLVM 20 update...

Solus 4.6 is out as the newest version of this popular desktop Linux distribution that is known for its default Budgie desktop while also shipping with other desktop options...

Intel engineers have released the oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library "oneDNN" version 3.6 release that serves as the building blocks for deep learning software like ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, Apache MXNet, Apache SIGNA, and optionally by PyTorch and TensorFlow with Intel's extensions...

It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support...

While ARM-based SoCs with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) aren't too common, there do exist some such as select models of the Huawei Kunpeng server SoC with SMT or there HiSilicon Kirin 9000S. As such Huawei/HiSilicon engineers have been working to expose SMT controls on ARM64 for the Linux kernel...

The OpenBSD project has released LibreSSL 4.0 as the newest version of this open-source TLS implementation that was forked from OpenSSL a decade ago...

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 released last week with RAIDZ expansion, fast deduplication, and direct IO support among other changes for this ZFS file-system implementation for use on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3-rc2 is out today with a few more interesting changes...

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support...

With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a GCC 15.0.0 status report for outlining the current development state of the GCC 15 open-source compiler as it works its way toward the stable GCC 15.1 release in the early months of 2025...

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling...

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets...

Inkscape 1.4 released on Sunday as the newest version of this cross-platform, open-source vector graphics editor...

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release...

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November...