Slovak advocates want parliament to push for open source

Slovak proponents of the use of free and open source software are rallying for their country’s parliament to approve plans to share the source code of software solutions developed by and for public services. They are concerned that proprietary software vendors will lobby for changes to the eGovernment act, a strategic IT Government proposal that is to be discussed in parliament in March or April.

Intel Graphics: Discrete Graphics Cards and SVT-AV1

• Intel Preps For Discrete Graphics Cards With Linux Patches

  Intel has confirmed that recent patches to its Linux graphics driver were related to its continued work on preparing the ecosystem for its new line of discrete graphics cards. Phoronix reported that Intel released 42 such patches with more than 4,000 lines of code between them on February 14. The main purpose of the patches was to introduce the concept of memory regions in "preparation for upcoming devices with device local memory." (Such as, you know, discrete graphics cards.) [...] Still, any information about Intel's graphics plans is welcome. Right now the graphics market is dominated by AMD and Nvidia, and as we noted in December, Intel is probably the only company that even has a possibility of successfully introducing a new discrete graphics architecture. Why not enjoy the occasional glimpse behind the curtain as that architecture's being built?

• SVT-VP9 Is Intel's Latest Open-Source Video Encoder Yielding High Performance VP9

  At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder. Uploaded on Friday was the initial public open-source commit of SVT-VP9, the Intel Scalable Video Technology VP9 encoder. With this encoder they are focusing on being able to provide real-time encoding of up to two 4Kp60 streams on an Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processor. SVT-VP9 is under a BSD-style license and currently runs on Windows and Linux.

How I got my job in Linux: from Newbie to Pro

I was peeved, because I’d spent my own money on building a computer and buying Microsoft Windows to put on it. Money that I really needed to pay the rent and put food in my belly. I also felt sorry for all the people that I’d end up re-installing Windows on their PC to fix their problem. I knew that most of them would probably be back in the store six or so months later with the same complaint. Almost by accident, I found Linux. I was in the magazine section of the PC shop I worked in one day in late 1999. I saw a magazine called ‘Linux Answers’. On the cover was a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.0. Before long, I had done the unthinkable: I had deleted Windows in a rage of fury because it had completely crashed and wouldn’t start up. All of my MP3s, photos and documents, all but gone save for a few backups on CDs I had lying around. Back in those days I had no idea that I would have been able to salvage those files with Linux; I just blithely reformatted my hard disk and went cold-turkey, believing everything that the magazine said, I forced myself into the abyss of the unknown! These were exciting times! I remember the blue text-mode installer, the glare of the many lines of text flying by when the machine started up for the first time. It looked really un-user friendly. Eventually, the screen flipped into what I’d later know to be called ‘runlevel 5’ and I could see a graphical login screen. Little did I know it, but that flashing cursor was the beginning to a whole new world of computing for me.

Linux 5.0-rc7

A nice and calm week, with statistics looking normal. Just under half drivers (gpu, networking, input, md, block, sound, ...), with the rest being architecture fixes (arm64, arm, x86, kvm), networking and misc (filesystem etc). Nothing particularly odd stands out, and everything is pretty small. Just the way I like it. Shortlog appended, Linus