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Sony Engineer Talks Up Using Flutter + Wayland For Their Embedded Interfaces

Phoronix | Oct. 28, 2020, 7 a.m. | Original

A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems.

Hidenori Matsubayashi of Sony talked at ELCE 2020 about their evaluation of different GUI toolkits for embedded use and ultimately how they fell for Flutter and Wayland. They came to that decision when evaluating the likes of Electron, Qt, GTK, WebKit/Chromium with WebView, and the many other options out there.

Their design requirements

Intel

Mesa 20.3 Supports Intel Alder Lake Gen12 Graphics

Phoronix | Oct. 28, 2020, 6:32 a.m. | Original

Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the "Alder Lake S" graphics support . That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support.

Given that Alder Lake is using Intel Xe "Gen12" graphics as found already

The Linux Kernel Looks To Eventually Drop Support For WiMAX

Phoronix | Oct. 28, 2020, 4:05 a.m. | Original

With the WiMAX 802.12 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain.

Longtime kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is proposing that the WiMAX Linux kernel infrastructure and the lone Intel 2400m driver be demoted from the networking subsystem to staging. In a future kernel release, the

Collabora's Work On Extending The Linux Kernel To Better Support Windows Gaming

Phoronix | Oct. 28, 2020, 1:08 a.m. | Original

Windows gaming on Linux got some love this week at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit Europe virtual event. In particular, a recap of the work that's been done so far on extending the Linux kernel to better support Wine / Steam Play based support for Windows games running on Linux.

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi as an engineer for consulting firm Collabora talked about their work in recent years on improving the Linux kernel for supporting Valve's needs around running Windows games on Linux with Steam Play. Collabora has been

AMDGPU Linux Driver To Finally Enable BACO For Hawaii - Allowing S4/Hibernation

Phoronix | Oct. 28, 2020, 12:06 a.m. | Original

The Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" series are about seven years old almost to the day and the AMD Linux open-source driver crew is seemingly celebrating by finally adding the few lines of code needed to enable BACO power management.

Bus Active, Chip Off (BACO) is finally seeing an AMDGPU Linux kernel driver patch as we approach the end of 2020 to enable it for "Hawaii" GPUs that initially were found in the Radeon R9 290 series and later the Radeon 3

FreeBSD 12.2 Released - Supports Linux In Jailed Environments, Better Hardware Support

Phoronix | Oct. 27, 2020, 8:26 p.m. | Original

FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE is now available as the latest feature and bug fix update to the FreeBSD 12 platform ahead of the expected FreeBSD 13.0 release around the end of Q1-2021.

FreeBSD 12.2 brings with it many improvements to the stable code-base for this BSD operating system including the likes of:

- The default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain and LLVM sub-projects updated against the 10.0.1 release.

- Updates to the wireless

Bcachefs Linux File-System Sent Out For Review With Exciting Feature Progress

Phoronix | Oct. 27, 2020, 4:46 p.m. | Original

Bcachefs has been developed for a half-decade now as the Linux file-system born out of the block cache "bcache" kernel code. Kent Overstreet continues spearheading the work and while it's been quiet in recent months today he sent out a new round of Bcachefs patches for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.

Bcachefs is a copy-on-write file-system aiming to compete with the likes of ZFS and Btrfs with features being worked on like Zstd/LZ4 compression, native encryption, advanced

Canonical's Snap Packaging Switching To LZO Compression For Faster Startup Times

Phoronix | Oct. 27, 2020, 3:22 p.m. | Original

The Snap packaging / software deployment effort led by Canonical for Ubuntu and other distributions currently relies on XZ compression of the SquashFS-based archives while moving forward they are planning to make use of LZO compression. Snap'ing with LZO will result in faster startup-times at the cost of larger packages.

LZO offers less compression abilities than XZ but has the benefit of being less taxing during decompression and thus faster. The Chromium browser Snap package, for example, is ~150MB with XZ compression but increases to

Rust Lands Experimental Cranelift-Based Code Generator - Much Faster Debug Build Times

Phoronix | Oct. 27, 2020, 1:54 p.m. | Original

Landing yesterday within the Rust code-base is the initial version of a Cranelift code generator back-end. By leveraging the Cranelift code generator that is developed as part of the Bytecode Alliance for WebAssembly, Rustc with Cranelift can experince much faster debug builds.

The pull request adding rustc_codegen_cranelift as an alternative code generator for the Rust compiler has been merged. When compiling Rust code with the debug mode set, this has the potential of speeding up compile times by 20~30% compared to the

A Look At The Performance Improvements With System76 Pop!_OS 20.10

Phoronix | Oct. 27, 2020, noon | Original

At the end of last week System76 released Pop!_OS 20.10 as their customized distribution built atop Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. For those curious here are some benchmarks of System76's Pop!_OS 20.10 versus 20.04 using the Thelio Major with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Pop!_OS 20.10 has similar key package versions to

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