RSS Reader

Radeon R600 Gallium3D Flips On OpenGL 4.5 For NIR Backend

Phoronix | March 3, 2021, 6 a.m. | Original

The experimental NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver as an alternative to the default TGSI code-path has now enabled OpenGL 4.5 support for capable GPUs.

With a number of OpenGL 4.5 conformance test suite fixes that were merged on Tuesday, OpenGL 4.5 is now ultimately enabled for the NIR code path.

This OpenGL 4.5 support is enabled for all Radeon HD 5000 "Cedar" GPUs through the Radeon HD 6000 series where

Gallium Nine Still Seeing Improvements In 2021 For Direct3D 9 Within Mesa

Phoronix | March 3, 2021, 3:20 a.m. | Original

While VKD3D has been receiving much attention these days for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API that can be consumed in a driver agnostic manner, Gallium Nine as a D3D9 state tracker going back years for Mesa continues to receive new work too.

Just today was a number of new commits into Mesa 21.1 for improving the "Nine" state tracker in Gallium3D. Among that work includes experimental FECH4 support , DF24 support ,

Gallium Nine Still Seeing Improvements In 2021 For Direct3D 9 Within Mesa

Phoronix | March 3, 2021, 3:20 a.m. | Original

While DXVK has been receiving much attention these days for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API that can be consumed in a driver agnostic manner, Gallium Nine as a D3D9 state tracker going back years for Mesa continues to receive new work too.

Just today was a number of new commits into Mesa 21.1 for improving the "Nine" state tracker in Gallium3D. Among that work includes experimental FECH4 support , DF24 support , and other

LVFS Serves Up 25 Million Firmware/BIOS Updates To Linux Users

Phoronix | March 3, 2021, midnight | Original

It was just this past September that LVFS served its 20 millionth firmware file to Linux users updating their system BIOS or device firmware using Fwupd while this week the Linux Vendor Firmware Service crossed the 25 million milestone!

LVFS/Fwupd lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat relayed the news that LVFS has now served more than 25 million firmware files to Linux users. Considering just a few years ago it was difficult updating your system BIOS under Linux and most hardware vendors wouldn't even consider offering firmware updates for Linux

Steam On Linux In February Still Residing Below 1%

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 6:05 p.m. | Original

Valve has released their updated Steam Survey figures for February 2021.

For January, the reported Steam Linux usage hit 0.91%, similar to where it was in November of last year . With the ongoing success of Steam Play (Proton + DXVK/VKD3D-Proton) for running many modern Windows games well under Linux, Steam on Linux has been enjoying the upper sub-1% space on a monthly basis -- normally 0.8~0.9%.

So after

Multiple New Security Issues Hit GRUB Bootloader Around Secure Boot

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 2:30 p.m. | Original

Last summer the GRUB bootloader was impacted by "BootHole" with security issues hitting its UEFI Secure Boot support while today a new round of vulnerabilities were made public.

A new set of GRUB2 security vulnerabilities were made public today affecting its UEFI Secure Boot support. A set of eight CVEs were issued in 2020 and this year for the new issues. The issues include the possibility of specially crafted ACPI tables being loaded even if Secure Boot is active, memory corruption in GRUB's menu rendering, use-

That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 1:43 p.m. | Original

Last week I issued a warning of possible data loss on the early Linux 5.12 kernel code that was reliably leaving my test systems severely corrupted. Intel's internal graphics test systems it turns out have now been bitten by this issue in encountering this significant file-system corruption and as such they've been quick to jump on the issue - there's now an idea what's causing the nasty issue and a workaround by reverting select patches.

As reported last week, on my test systems with

Chrome 89 Released With Various New Web APIs Deemed Stable

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 1:30 p.m. | Original

Chrome 89 is out today as the latest stable version of Google's web browser. With Chrome 89 various new APis are deemed stable including WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial.

Chrome 89 promoted its WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial support with those APIs for HID devices, near field communication, and serial devices being deemed ready for production use. Chrome 89 is also significant for AV1 encoding support for WebRTC in early form.

Chrome 89 also brings Web Share and Web Share Target support

Updated Portal 2 Vulkan Rendering Code Yielding Great Radeon Results

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 12:02 p.m. | Original

Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.

In February was the surprise announcement of Vulkan rendering API support for Portal 2 . Valve is making use of Vulkan with Portal 2 by leveraging the DXVK native library for translating the game's existing Direct3D 9 usage to Vulkan. The existing OpenGL support for Portal 2 on Linux remains available.

Updated Portal 2 Vulkan Rendering Code Yielding Great Radeon Results

Phoronix | March 2, 2021, 12:02 p.m. | Original

Menu