Licensing in Kate and Other KDE News/Changes

• MIT licensed KSyntaxHighlighting usage

  With the KDE Frameworks 5.50 release, the KSyntaxHighlighting framework was re-licensed to the MIT license. This re-licensing only covers the actual code in the library and the bundled themes but not all of the syntax highlighting definition data files. One of the main motivation points was to get QtCreator to use this, if possible, instead of their own implementation of the Kate highlighting they needed to create in the past due to the incompatible licensing of KatePart at that time (and the impossibility to do a quick split/re-licensing of the parts in question).

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 41

• KDE Will Now Set Scale Factor For GTK Apps, Plasma Gets Other Scaling & UI Polishing Too

  KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of interesting development activities impacting Plasma, Frameworks, and the Applications stack. When the display scaling factor for KDE is set to an integer, KDE will now export that as well to the GNOME/GTK environment variables of GDK_SCALE/GDK_DPI_SCALE, for helping out GTK applications running on the KDE desktop so they should still scale appropriately. The Wayland behavior was already correct while this should help out GTK X11 applications. The GNOME/GTK scaling though only supports scaling by integer numbers.

Graphics: NVIDIA, Kazan, Sway and Panfrost

• NVIDIA Developers Express Interest In Helping Out libc++/libstdc++ Parallel Algorithms

  NVIDIA developers have expressed interest in helping the open-source GCC libstdc++ and LLVM Clang libc++ standard libraries in bringing up support for the standardized parallel algorithms. C++17 brings parallelized versions for some of the algorithms exposed by the C++ standard library, but sadly GCC's libstdc++ and LLVM's libc++ do not yet support these parallel algorithms while the rest of their C++17 support is in great shape. Going back over a year Intel has been interested in contributing parallel support code to these C++ standard libraries that could be shared by both projects. The Intel path builds in abstractions for supporting different underlying thread/parallelism APIs.

• The Rust-Written Kazan Vulkan Driver Lights Up Its Shader Compiler

  This week the Kazan project (formerly known as "Vulkan-CPU") celebrated a small but important milestone in its trek to having a CPU-based Vulkan software implementation. As a refresher, Kazan is the project born as Vulkan-CPU during the 2017 Google Summer of Code. The work was started by student developer Jacob Lifshay and he made good progress last summer on the foundation of the project and continued contributing past the conclusion of that Google-funded program. By the end of the summer he was able to run some simple Vulkan compute tests. He also renamed Vulkan-CPU to Kazan (Japanese for "volcano").

• Sway 1.0 Beta Released - Offers 100% Compatibility With i3 Window Manager

  The Sway Wayland compositor inspired by X11's i3 window manager is now up to its beta ahead of the big 1.0 release. Sway 1.0 Beta offers "100%" compatibility with the i3 window manager. The Sway 1.0 release has also been working on many other changes including improved window handling, multi-GPU support, virtual keyboard protocol, real-time video capture, tablet support, and many other changes.

• Panfrost Open-Source GPU Driver Continues Advancing For Mali GPUs

  The Panfrost open-source, community-driven, reverse-engineered graphics driver for ARM Mali graphics processors continues panning out pretty well. Alyssa Rosenzweig has provided an update this weekend on the state of Panfrost for open-source Mali 3D support. The developers involved have been working out some texture issues, various OpenGL / GLES issues around GLMark2, and support now for running Wayland's Weston reference compositor.

Android Leftovers

• Google adds floating keyboard mode to Gboard for Android

• Sony Promotes Kodi Streaming Add-Ons as Ideal for its Android TVs

• Android 9 Pie tipped to hit Samsung flagship phones in early 2019

• Android phones not saving pictures taken with Google Camera

• This week in Android: Pixel 3 review, Huawei Mate 20 hands-on, and more!

The Performance & Power Efficiency Of The Core i7 990X vs. Core i9 9900K

With my initial Core i9 9900K benchmarks out there following Friday's embargo expiration, for some weekend benchmarking fun I decided to pull out the old Core i7 990X to see how it compares to the new 9900K... The Gulftown and Coffeelake processors were compared not only on raw performance but also overall power consumption and performance-per-Watt. The Core i7 990X was the Extreme Edition processor back from 2011 codenamed "Gulftown" (Westmere microarchitecture), the 32nm generation before Sandy Bridge. Granted the announced but not yet released Core i9 9900X X-Series CPU will be more akin for comparison to the 990X, and I will at such time that it is available, but just for some extra benchmark runs over the weekend I was curious to see how the 990X and 9900K compare...