SuperTuxKart 1.1 Prepping Improved Internet Multiplayer, More Polishing
For those looking for some family-friendly Linux gaming this holiday season, a release candidate of the Mario Kart inspired SuperTuxKart 1.1 is now available for your enjoyment... err testing...
LLVM Begins Landing Preliminary Patches Around Intel's JCC Erratum, GAS Support Landed
Disclosed back in November was the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum affecting Skylake and newer CPUs that could lead to "unpredictable behavior" when jump instructions cross cache lines. Intel issued a CPU microcode update to address the problem at a performance cost, but with some compiler toolchain magic, it's possible to mitigate a good portion of that impact...
Fedora 32 Could Make It Easier To Swap Out GCC, Other Compiler Alternative Options
Adding to the interesting list of proposed features for Fedora 32 would be update-alternatives handling of /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ to more easily and seamlessly allowing pointing them at alternative compilers...
Intel Adding DRM-Based Scaling Filter Support For Wayland's Weston For Less Blurry Outputs
Intel contributions to Wayland/Weston aren't as frequent as years ago, but they continue volleying interesting work to keep pace with their graphics driver and Direct Rendering Manager subsystem advancements. Their latest work is on adding scaling filter support to libweston in order to supporting filters like nearest-neighbor for yielding less blurry outputs when upscaling...
The Kubuntu Focus KDE Linux Laptop Arrives
Soft-announced earlier this week was the Kubuntu Focus as a high-end Linux laptop pre-loaded with the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. The Kubuntu Focus produced in cooperation with Mindshare Management, Kubuntu itself, and German manufacturer Tuxedo Computers will officially launch in January and begin shipping shortly thereafter while a review sample arrived in our lab today...
Intel Still Has The Upperhand On BSD Support - Core i9 10980XE Benchmarks With DragonFlyBSD + FreeBSD
While the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is delivering better raw Linux performance in a far majority of workloads compared to the Intel Core i9 10980XE, one of the areas where the Cascadelake-X platform and Intel CPUs still have an advantage is when it comes to the BSD support. Intel actively supports the BSDs more than AMD and in turn leads to the latest hardware generally working out fine on the latest BSDs. Here are some DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD tests against Linux with the i9
Linux 5.5 Lands Fix For Booting New AMD Ryzen Threadripper Processors Without MCE Hang
The AMD machine check exception (MCE) code fix for Linux has landed ahead of this weekend's anticipated 5.5-rc3 release. This AMD MCE fix allows for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900 series processors introduced last month to boot the Linux kernel without hangs or other workarounds...
Radeon ROCm 3.0 Released With LLVM "AOMP" For Radeon OpenMP, FFT Updates
Announced last month at SuperComputing 19 in Denver was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 (ROCm 3.0) but it didn't end up shipping until last night. ROCm 3.0 is a big update to AMD's open-source Linux compute stack for ending out 2019...
Mesa's LLVMpipe Software OpenGL Driver Now Uses NIR By Default
Joining the NIR driver bandwagon recently was LLVMpipe adding support for this new intermediate representation. Now with that support having matured, Mesa 20.0-devel's LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver is switching to NIR by default in place of TGSI...
Sailfish OS Nuuksio Adds VP9 + HEVC Hardware Video Decode, Android App Fixes
Jolla has announced Sailfish OS 3.2.1 "Nuuksio" as their mobile operating system update to end out 2019...