Svobodný software

AMD today lifted the lid on the Radeon RX 5500 series as their first Navi 14 based graphics card. This is the soft launch with no units shipping yet but expected to starting in November...

For those wondering, NVIDIA is still pursuing a generic allocator / Unix device memory allocator that has been talked about for years and a potential successor to the likes of the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM). They now have an implementation of their proposed allocator working for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver though there still is a lot of work ahead...

With RMS resigning as head of the FSF but ultimately is remaining as head of the GNU, the Free Software Foundation is now publicly re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU...

The GNU Debugger (GDB) now has support for the Compact C Type Format following support for this debugging information format having been added to the GCC compiler and Binutils...

O víkendu 5. a 6. října proběhl v pražských Dejvicích osmý ročník konference LinuxDays. Opět jste mohli shlédnout desítky přednášek, zúčastnit se workshopů nebo navštívit zajímavé stánky projektů.

While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms...

While Red Hat is pursuing Pipewire with plans to fill the use-cases provided by the JACK(2) low-latency audio server, JACK2 isn't letting up and Sunday marked version 1.9.13 for the project and their first release since December 2017...

Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions...

[17 minut čtení] O víkendu 5. a 6. října probíhal v Praze osmý ročník konference LinuxDays. Velká skupina přednášek se točila kolem bezpečnosti: chybné procesory, slabá hesla, webové prohlížeče a klonování SIM karet. Pokud náš procesor má několik jednotek, dokáže vykonávat instrukce napřed. Když se procesor dostane na rozcestí, třeba je tam podmíněný skok, musí se rozhodnout, jestli půjde tam nebo jinam. Proto potřebuje výsledek podmínky, která rozhoduje, kam se má vydat. Ta může být poměrně složitá, může potřebovat nějaký výpočet. Procesor ale tyhle výsledky ještě nemá. Může se buď zastavit a počkat nebo se některé právě nepoužívané jednotky mohou jedním směrem vydat.

[4 minuty čtení] Dnes se podíváme na poněkud zákeřné pohyblivé obrázky, na chybu v MTA Exim, povíme si o prakticky nezjistitelných možnostech sledování pomocí zpráv SMS, o botnetu šířícím se bez fyzických souborů s exploity a další. Na animované obrázky GIF lze dnes narazit prakticky všude: sociální sítě, emotikony, vtípky pro zasmání, reklama. Myslíte, že by pomocí nevinně vyhlížejícího obrázku s přáním „Šťastných a veselých“ někdo dokázal hacknout váš telefon? Teď už na tuto otázku známe překvapivou odpověď: ano.

Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid...

With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.

While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine...

WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months...

While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack...

In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model...

The Qt Company this week released the public beta of the forthcoming Qt 3D Studio for this development tool focused on creating rich 3D user interfaces with the Qt tool-kit...

This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference...

KDE developers spent the first week of October working on improvements to their Dolphin file manager, seemingly never-ending work on HiDPI support, and a variety of other enhancements for this leading open-source desktop...

This week the GTK 4.0 development code picked up support for making use of the VK_KHR_incremental_present extension with its Vulkan renderer in order to allow much more efficient behavior...