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FreeBSD Completes Its Transition From Subversion To Git For Development

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, 8:57 a.m. | Original

The past several days FreeBSD has been working to complete its migration from their development being done with Subversion to instead using the Git distributed revision control system as used by most other open-source projects.

FreeBSD's transition from Subversion to Git is now complete. The migration was completed yesterday and new code is now flowing into its main Git repository .

Those curious about this long overdue conversion for FreeBSD from SVN to Git can be found via the FreeBSD Wiki but long story short they are now finally onto using Git.

Intel

Intel Preparing Linear Address Masking Support (LAM)

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, 7:17 a.m. | Original

A few days ago there was a glibc commit mentioning Intel "LAM" and now the updated Intel documentation sheds more light on this forthcoming processor feature.

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with new features coming to future Intel CPUs. This includes outlining Intel LAM to shed more light on it. The December 2020 update also includes updates to the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface as well as a chapter on new error codes for Sapphire Rapids processors. The Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface functionality was talked about a few months

FreeType Merges New "SDF" Renderer For High Quality Text Rendering In Games, Etc

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, 6:56 a.m. | Original

As a Christmas gift to font enthusiasts, the FreeType font rasterization engine today merged its SDF renderer.

The new SDF code was merged today across the span of many commits. The FreeType Signed Distance Field (SDF) rasterizer generates SDF directly from outlines unlike the existing "BSDF" rasterizer in FreeType that first goes through bitmaps.

The FreeType SDF code was written by Anuj Verma and its approach based on a master's thesis written in 2015 by a Viktor Chlumsky, "Shape Decomposition for Multi-channel Distance

Darktable 3.4 Released For Leading Open-Source RAW Photography Software

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, 6:35 a.m. | Original

Darktable 3.4 is out in time for dealing with any of your RAW holiday photos.

The open-source, cross-platform Darktable software continues as one of the leading free, non-destructive RAW photo post-production software solutions available. Darktable 3.4 reworks the program's camera tethering view, a new module grouping feature has been added, a new color calibration module has been added with better color correction abilities, an enhanced map view, reworks to some areas of the GUI, and dozens of

Happy Holidays As We End Out 2020 Plus One Last Phoronix Premium Special

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, 3:30 a.m. | Original

To those celebrating any year-end holidays, Happy Holidays / Merry Christmas. It's been a hell of a year and 2021 will hopefully be better. In any event even if not celebrating any end of year holidays or other events, there still is daily Phoronix content to come.

Still to come in the concluding days of 2020 are more AMD Zen 3 benchmarks with continuing to be impressed by the performance and finding new areas to benchmark, the Linux 5.11 kernel testing

Reiser4 Updated For Linux 5.10 Compatibility, Reiser5 Effort One Year Old

Phoronix | Dec. 24, 2020, midnight | Original

The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has now been ported to the week-old Linux 5.10 kernel code-base. This also comes days ahead of the one year anniversary since the "Version 5" announcement.

For those still relying upon this out-of-tree file-system, Reiser4 saw its port released today for the Linux 5.10.2 kernel. It was a straight-forward port from Linux 5.9 to 5.10 while in

LibreOffice 7.1-RC1 Released For Testing This Open-Source Office Suite

Phoronix | Dec. 23, 2020, 5 p.m. | Original

For those with extra time around the holidays, the first release candidate of LibreOffice 7.1 is now available for testing.

After the alpha in October and beta in November , LibreOffice 7.1 is ending out 2020 with their initial release candidate. There have been more than 200 new commits that landed ahead of the 7.1-RC1 release.

Downloads and more details on the LibreOffice 7.1 release candidate via the LibreOffice QA blog . Two more release candidates of LibreOffice 7.

Linux 5.11 Finally Flushes Out Its Qt4 Code For Configuring Kernel Builds UI

Phoronix | Dec. 23, 2020, 3:32 p.m. | Original

Linux 5.11's Kconfig build configuration updates are bringing some long overdue improvements to its "Qconf" Qt toolkit user interface option for configuring Linux kernel builds.

Qt 5.0 was released eight years ago and earlier this month Qt 6.0 was christened. Most software was converted from Qt4 to Qt5 years ago but the Linux Kconfig code when firing up the Qt interface has retained support going back to Qt4. But for Linux 5.11 that is being remove to now focus on

Linux 5.11 Intel P-State Schedutil Tuned For Better Efficiency. Avoid Running "Too Fast"

Phoronix | Dec. 23, 2020, 1:13 p.m. | Original

Last week the Linux 5.11 power management updates were merged while on Tuesday some additional new material was merged, primarily around Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling governor when running with the "Schedutil" governor that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data.

With this pull request for P-State is a rework to its passive-mode fast-switch path so it avoids "running some workloads too fast" and will now side with better energy efficiency in select cases while still providing sufficient

Windows 10 Competing Well Against Ubuntu 20.10 On The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Phoronix | Dec. 23, 2020, 10:35 a.m. | Original

Earlier this month we were a bit surprised to see Windows 10 performing close to Ubuntu 20.10 on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X . With prior AMD Ryzen (and Intel Core) desktop CPUs we normally are used to seeing Ubuntu Linux exhibit healthy performance advantages over Windows 10 in most workloads. But with Zen 3 the Windows vs. Linux performance is much closer and thus led us to also running Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks on the higher-end Ryzen 9 59

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