CooliPi 4B Is The Best Raspberry Pi 4 Heatsink We Have Tested Yet

While the Raspberry Pi folks have been making thermal/power improvements to the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware, running this budget-friendly ARM single board computer with a heatsink or some form of cooling is certainly recommended if you want to sure it operates at the optimal clock frequencies. A Phoronix reader devised the CooliPi 4B and it's wound up being one of the best Raspberry Pi 4 cooler we have tested to date.


The Debate Continues Over How To Transition GCC's SVN Repository To Git

Under the planned time-line for transitioning to a Git workflow for the GNU Compiler Collection that was established back at the GNU Tools cauldron conference, 16 December was to be the cut-off for deciding which Git conversion program to use for translating their massive SVN repository into Git. That puts today as the deadline in order to meet their goal of switching over to Git at the start of 2020, but it looks like it could take several more days to decide their SVN-to-Git approach


NVIDIA Launches Open-Source Video Processing Framework For Python

NVIDIA's "VideoProcessingFramework" is an open-source set of C++ libraries that are wrapped around by Python bindings for interacting with their closed-source Video Codec SDK. The function of this framework is to make it easy to exploit GPU-accelerated video encode/decode from Python...


Mir Lands Server-Side Decoration Support For XWayland

Making Mir's XWayland support much more usable now is initial server-side decoration support in order to handle window resizing and window movements...


AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB Linux Gaming Performance

Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card as the sub-$200 Navi 14 graphics card in versions with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. In our launch-day Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux testing the benchmarks of this budget 7nm graphics card was done using the 4GB review sample, but with Phoronix readers being curious about the 8GB version, I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT GV-R


Intel

Intel Buys Out AI Startup Habana Labs

Well, here is some interesting M+A activity a week ahead of Christmas... Intel just announced they are acquiring AI chipmaker start-up Habana Labs...


DXVK 1.5 Released With The Newly-Added Direct3D 9 Support

Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.5 as the newest version of this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation and is a big release considering last night's merging of D9VK / Direct3D 9 support...


GNU C Library 2.31 Should Be Out In February - To Ship With Fedora 32

As part of Fedora 32's bleeding-edge compiler toolchain with the likes of GCC 10 and LLVM 10, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved making use of GNU C Library 2.31. Glibc 2.31 will be out early next year with more features in tow...


AMD Threadripper 3900 Series MCE Fix Queued In RAS/Core But Not Yet Mainlined

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X are incredibly fast and trounce the competition, but as noted on launch-day most (all?) Linux distributions have a boot issue with them over a machine check exception. There is an easy workaround to let these core-happy CPUs boot and run Linux while the proper fix was queued last week in ras/core in what looks like it will wait until Linux 5.6 for merging...


Raspberry Pi 4's V3D Driver Adds OpenGL ES 3.2 Geometry Shader Support

The Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver within Mesa 20.0 now has initial support for geometry shaders as needed by OpenGL ES 3.2...