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Wine-Staging 5.19 Adds Windows.Networking.Connectivity

Phoronix | Oct. 10, 2020, 3:48 a.m. | Original

Following yesterday's release of Wine 5.19 , the developers responsible for the Wine-Staging have issued their corresponding update for this codebase that adds 600+ patches currently undergoing testing.

Wine-Staging 5.19 is a bit lighter in that a few patches were upstreamed but a number of patches were also updated to jive with the Wine 5.19 code-base. Adjustments to Wine-Staging were needed for NTDLL, XACTEngine, and other bits.

The sole new functionality introduced in

Intel's Latest Compute Code Is Enabling OpenCL 3.0 For All Hardware Since Broadwell

Phoronix | Oct. 10, 2020, midnight | Original

Intel's next Compute Runtime release is going to be exciting as OpenCL 3.0 will be enabled for all graphics hardware found going back to Broadwell CPUs.

On Friday Intel released Compute-Runtime 20.40.18075 as their latest OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero stack update with an updated IGC compiler and L0 loader. This release continues offering Level Zero 1.0 support for all hardware back to Skylake. On the OpenCL side, Intel continues providing OpenCL 3.0 support for

Wine 5.19 Released With A Variety Of Changes

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 5:12 p.m. | Original

Wine 5.19 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms.

Wine 5.19 doesn't have any ground-breaking changes but various improvements all over. The official release highlights on Wine 5.19 include:

- Wine Mono engine updated to 5.1.1, with WPF text formatting support.
- KERNEL32 library converted to PE.
- DSS cryptographic provider.
- Windowing support in the new

EXT4 "Fast Commits" Coming For Big Performance Boost In Ordered Mode

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 2:51 p.m. | Original

After being in development for more than one year, it looks like with Linux 5.10 there will be EXT4 fast commit support.

Hitting the EXT4 dev branch today was the work by Ted Ts'o on implementing fast commits for the file-system. As that dev branch is ultimately from where he sends in the new EXT4 file-system feature code, it looks like this big ticket feature will land with the upcoming Linux 5.10 cycle.

EXT4 fast commits are based on

The Current Intel Coffee Lake Mitigation Performance Impact With Linux 5.9

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 2:07 p.m. | Original

Of the many new features in Linux 5.9 with its debut set for this weekend, one of the performance-related changes is Intel FSGSBASE support finally being mainlined . A half-decade after the Linux patches first appeared for this feature present in Intel CPUs going back to Ivy Bridge, the mainline kernel is now patched for this feature that can help out I/O and other context switching heavy workloads. Given many of the same workloads were negatively impacted by the CPU security mitigations of recent years, here is a

Paragon Sends Out Latest NTFS Read-Write Linux Driver Patches

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 10:45 a.m. | Original

Back in August was the big surprise of file-system driver vendor Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that is much more advanced than the existing NTFS Linux driver. While not merged yet, on Friday the latest version was sent out for review.

The current NTFS Linux kernel driver is not actively maintained and lacks proper write support for this very common Microsoft file-system. Paragon meanwhile has long been offering this commercial NTFS driver to the likes of macOS and Linux while seemingly at the end of

KDE Plasma Mobile Has Been Making Great Progress

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 9 a.m. | Original

Not only is the Plasma 5.20 desktop shining and more Wayland improvements and other enhancements queuing for Plasma 5.21, but the Plasma Mobile effort is also beginning to shine.

A monthly development report was published today for KDE Plasma Mobile and over the course of September there was some significant strides made on this KDE mobile initiative. Some of the September 2020 work achieved for Plasma Mobile includes:

- File dialog handling improvements around the XDG Desktop Portal with Flatpak + PLasma integration.

- Maliit2

The Linux Kernel Preparing To Take Advantage Of The Intel DSA / ENQCMD In Sapphire Rapids

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 6:46 a.m. | Original

Expected with next year's Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs is the Intel DSA as the Data Streaming Accelerator for high performance data movement and transformation operations . Since the end of 2019 there have been Linux patches surfacing for bringing up the DSA support and now as we roll into 2021 the Linux kernel looks to begin making use of the new capabilities.

With the Intel DSA block there are new instructions with ENQCMD/ENQCMDS for submitting work descriptors along with the PASID instruction for the Process Address Space ID

FFmpeg Now Supports VP9 Profile 2 VDPAU Decode (10-bit / 12-bit)

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 6:19 a.m. | Original

New to the RTX 30 series and the NVIDIA 455 Linux driver is decode support with VDPAU for VP9 10-bit and 12-bit content, which can now be taken advantage of by the popular FFmpeg multimedia library.

FFmpeg on Thursday landed support for VP9 Profile 2 VDPAU support, which is the 10 and 12-bit format addition.

That support was merged and ready to go for the overdue FFmpeg 4.4 release. Or at this stage it wouldn't surprise

Intel

AMD Reportedly In Talks To Acquire Xilinx

Phoronix | Oct. 9, 2020, 5:57 a.m. | Original

While AMD is providing great pressure against Intel in the CPU space, it looks like AMD could be soon going up against them in the FPGA space too.

The latest M&A chip talk is that AMD is reportedly in advanced talks to buy Xilinx. According to the Wall Street Journal , AMD has been looking to court Xilinx for more than $30 billion USD.

Xilinx is known for their FPGAs and AMD acquiring them could help them in more areas compete against Intel. It's also at a time the

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