Imagination Technologies is preparing an open-source driver for the PowerVR GPU in Linux 6.8
Those who longingly looked for an open driver for Linux when they were a teenager with the first PowerVR GPUs may be raising grandchildren on their laps, but it doesn’t matter, the main thing is that it will be. Imagination is preparing an open DRM driver for the PowerVR family of GPUs, and they should be able to do so after the next release of the Linux 6.8 kernel, sometime early next year.
Unfortunately for the old timers, it will be a driver for current GPUs, the cursed generations from the time of the famous Intel/Poulsbo are out of luck. Phoronix also reminds that the years-long development of this driver takes place simultaneously with the development of the Vulkan driver for PowerVR within the Mesa project (the plan is to use the Zink translation layer for OpenGL, i.e. OpenGL-on-Vulkan). The development of the new driver is primarily implemented with the AX-1–16M GPU and the Texas Instruments SK-AM62 board, but the kernel driver also works with the BeaglePlay board.
The driver is developed in the green field, supports DMA-BUF / PRIME, DRM sync objects, power management, virtual address spaces, GPU job submission + hang recovery and other common things, informs Phoronix.
LibreOffice 24.2 Alpha 1 shows what’s new
It has been marked on Git for the LibreOffice office suite project next version 24.2, the one that changes the package numbering to “year.month”. Of course, there are many novelties, but they are still rather trial and experimental. Writer shows improved support for multi-page floating tables, Calc has a new search field in the sidebar, and Impress got a Small Caps implementation.
In the package, we find the option of automatically saving backup copies turned on by default, which makes the run more robust in the event of various errors or program crashes. Many improvements have been made to the automatic crash recovery code.
It is no longer necessary to click through to an item in the package preferences, a search is available here. Furthermore, automatic switching to a dark appearance theme and a dark icon theme now also works for interface variants built on Qt, i.e. KDE Plasma or LXQt. A password strength indicator has been added to the save with password dialog.
Details summarizes the Wiki entry on the LibreOffice project website. This is the first alpha release, it will be followed by a feature freeze (early December) followed by a beta version and at least three more candidates are expected for a live release, which therefore according to the plan it will be released in February 2024. For now, we’ll take LibreOffice 24.2 more as a preview of what’s possible, but this version is still far from production deployment.
A week in KDE: 221 bugs closed, 162 in queue
Finishing work on Plasma 6, or on her Feature Freeze, continued this past week. Developers have closed 221 bug reports, 162 are still waiting to be fixed. For example, shutting down and restarting Plasma PCs on Wayland is fixed, where until now applications with split work wouldn’t ask to save that work, but would just shut down (this was one of three Wayland-related things blocking the whole thing).
The partition manager no longer allows the user to write something to fstab that will make the partition unmountable. Various visual details have also been fixed (items on the Desktop, changed avatar immediately appearing in the menu, etc.). After downloading the offline update, it is possible to restart the machine without the need to update directly (we are considering adding the same for shutdown – just like Windows has it).
The dialogue for killing an unresponsive window got a new, nicer interface and is finally available on Wayland as well. Spectacle can also be opened by pressing Meta+Shift+S. All this and more details comments Nate Graham in an overview on his blog.
LACT neboli Linux AMDGPU Control Application.
While AMD’s Radeons work quite well through the open AMDGPU driver, what Linux lacks compared to Windows is any control application for the capabilities that modern Radeons have. AMD just left it up to the desktop makers and they don’t have the time/options/resources to take care of it. But now the LACT application is newly available, which can handle the settings of various things with Radeons. This is the latest community effort to do so.
LACT offers things like overclocking, adjusting fan speed curves, all in an app written in Rust and built on GTK4. There is not much yet, we can still only dream about FSR2 and similar features on Linux, whether it is their support in the driver or in the utility application, but we will see if LACT catches on. App previews offered by the Phoronix server.
2023-11-25 23:04:10
#KDE #continues #debug #Plasma #Wayland #Radeons #control #Root.cz
