Graphics/Benchmarks
Nvidia and Linux/Mozilla
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 12th of April 2021 08:04:05 PM Filed under


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Nvidia to bring GeForce RTX graphics to ARM-based Chromebooks and Linux PCs
At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company was working with industry partners to make its graphics technology more widely accessible. Specifically, Huang mentioned that it is looking to bring its GeForce GPU graphics technology to ARM-based processors that are popular on Chromebooks today.
“We’re announcing a partnership with MediaTek to create a reference system and SDK for Chrome OS and Linux PCs,” Huang said during his keynote presentation at GTC while highlighting the power efficiency and popularity of ARM processors due to their open licensing model. “Combining Nvidia GPUs and MediaTek SoCs [systems on a chip] will make excellent PCs and notebooks.”
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Mozilla partners with NVIDIA to democratize and diversify voice technology
Over the next decade, speech is expected to become the primary way people interact with devices — from laptops and phones to digital assistants and retail kiosks. Today’s voice-enabled devices, however, are inaccessible to much of humanity because they cannot understand vast swaths of the world’s languages, accents, and speech patterns.
To help ensure that people everywhere benefit from this massive technological shift, Mozilla is partnering with NVIDIA, which is investing $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice, an ambitious, open-source initiative aimed at democratizing and diversifying voice technology development.
Most of the voice data currently used to train machine learning algorithms is held by a handful of major companies. This poses challenges for others seeking to develop high-quality speech recognition technologies, while also exacerbating the voice recognition divide between English speakers and the rest of the world.
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Introducing Pipeworld: Spreadsheet Dataflow Computing
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 12th of April 2021 06:58:57 PM Filed under
Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella together into one – and one we have been building towards for a depressing number of years and tens of thousands of hours.
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Pipeworld will join Safespaces in acting as the main requirement ‘driver’ in improving Arcan and evolving its set of features, while Durden takes the backseat and moves more towards stabilisation.
These projects are not entirely disjunct. Pipewold has been written in such a way that the dataflow and window management can be integrated as tools in these two other environments so that you can mix and match – have Pipeworld be a pulldown HUD in Durden or 360 degrees programmable layers in Safespaces with 3D data actually looking that way.
The analysis and statistics tools that are part of Senseye will join in here, along with other security/reverse engineering projects I have around here.
Accessibility will be one major target for this project. The zoomable nature helps a bit, but much more interesting is the data-oriented workflow; with it comes the ability to logically address / route and treat clients as multi-representation interactive ‘data sources’ with typed inputs and outputs rather than mere opaque box-trees with prematurely composed (mixed contents) pixels and rigid ‘drag and drop’ as main data exchange. With programmable text-to-speech and OCR already available to any Arcan application, when combined with the logically
Another major target is collaboration. Since we can dynamically redirect, splice, compose and transform clients in a network friendly way, new collaboration tools emerge organically from the pieces that are already present.
Where we need much more work is at the edges of client and device compatibility, i.e. modify the bridge tools to provide translations to non-native clients. A direct and simple example is taking our Xorg fork, Xarcan, and intercept ‘screen reading’ requests and substitute for whatever we route to it at the moment – as well as exposing composed cell output as capture devices over v4l2-loopback and so on.
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Radeon Vulkan Variable Rate Shading Benchmarks For Boosting RDNA2 Performance
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 12th of April 2021 06:32:20 PM Filed under
Landing in Mesa 21.1 on Friday was a variable rate shading (VRS) override for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver for providing significant performance boosts by effectively rendering less. This feature is limited to RDNA2 graphics processors while here are some benchmarks on what it means for 4K gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards on Linux.
The Mesa RADV driver has Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support for trading less rendering for higher performance. The driver allows setting an environment variable (RADV_FORCE_VRS) to force-enable the functionality even for games/software not making direct use of Vulkan VRS. A value of 2x2 will reduce the fragment shader invocations per pixel to one per 2x2 pixels as a decent performance boost while not degrading quality too much. For the benchmarking today I tested the RDNA2 graphics cards available with the 2x2 setting compared to no overrides.
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Graphics: Mesa, Xwayland, and LuxCoreRender
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 10th of April 2021 08:55:34 PM Filed under
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Mesa 21 Broke VAAPI Hardware Encoding On Machines With AMD Graphics Cards. A Fix Is Coming. - LinuxReviews
Those of you who have tried to hardware encode video using AMD hardware after upgrading to Mesa 21 may have noticed that the encoded video is, in fact, not a video - it's some kind of odd slide-show with one new frame every 5 seconds or so. Mesa 20.3 didn't have that problem, Mesa 21 and the newly released 21.0.2 bug-fix do. The Mesa developers are aware of the problem we are referring to and a patch has been merged into the upcoming 21.0.3 version scheduled to be released around two weeks from now.
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Xwayland Has Gained Support For Hardware Acceleration On Machines With Nvidia graphics Cards - LinuxReviews
Xwayland, a component that allows X programs to run on the Wayland display server, has finally gained support for running X programs under Wayland with hardware acceleration on Nvidia hardware. This has been a sour-spot for Wayland since its inception, not having backwards compatibility with the most widely used display server is kind of a bummer. Support is finally there in the git master branch thanks to what looks to be a joint Nvidia/RedHat effort.
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LuxCoreRender 2.5 Open-Source PBR Renderer Released With NVIDIA OptiX/RTX Support - Phoronix
The LuxCoreRender open-source physically based rendering (PBR) software is out with its latest major feature release that now offers NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration support alongside the existing CPU, NVIDIA CUDA, and OpenCL rendering paths.
LuxCoreRender 2.5 now allows making use of NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration when running with a supported graphics card on the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack. LuxCoreRender 2.5 also has an OptiX denoiser image pipeline plugin.
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Hardware-Accelerated XWayland With NVIDIA
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 9th of April 2021 06:21:19 PM Filed under
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X.Org Server Git Lands Support For Hardware-Accelerated XWayland With NVIDIA - Phoronix
The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.
The XWayland changes needed to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work in an accelerated manner have landed in X.Org Server 1.21 Git. The main change is xwayland: implement pixmap_from_buffers for the eglstream backend that was merged just a few minutes ago.
Before getting too excited, this support is contingent upon a new NVIDIA proprietary driver release. That much anticipated driver update looks to be the forthcoming NVIDIA 470 Linux driver series.
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Xwayland work for hardware accelerated NVIDIA support has been merged in
Another exciting moment for fans of Wayland and the future of Linux, especially if you're an NVIDIA user, as the work to provide hardware accelerated rendering for NVIDIA GPUs was merged in for Xwayland. We've been following this work for a while, as an upcoming NVIDIA driver will have the code in for everything to be in place (likely NVIDIA 470).
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Sway 1.6 Wayland Compositor Released With Smoother Move/Resize
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 8th of April 2021 02:01:11 AM Filed under
Sway 1.6 is official today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.
Sway 1.6 ships with more than 200 changes from 69 contributors, providing a number of new features as well as many bug fixes.
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Graphics: Mesa 21.0.2, Sparse Buffers, and Wayland
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 8th of April 2021 01:03:45 AM Filed under
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mesa 21.0.2
Hi list, It's that time again, Mesa 21.0.2 is now available for general consumption. This release is the culmination of two weeks of hard work from the community. There's lots of good fixes here for basically everything in the tree from the compilers, to radv, utils, r600, intel, lavapipe, egl, aco, st/mesa, and panfrost. Cheers, Dylan
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Mesa 21.0.2 Released With Lavapipe Fixes, Improved AMD L3 Cache Calculation
Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers.
Accumulating for Mesa 21.0.2 is the usual random smothering of fixes but with no area dominating the change-log this time around. Mesa 21.0.2 has just a few fixes for the likes of the Radeon and Intel drivers but nothing too exciting there. The other changes include several Lavapipe Vulkan CPU driver fixes, disabling of sparse buffers on GFX7/GFX8 for RadeonSi, Mesa state tracker fixes, and a few EGL fixes too.
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Sparse – Mike Blumenkrantz – Super. Good. Code.
The great thing about tomorrow is that it never comes.
Let’s talk about sparse buffers.
What is a sparse buffer? A sparse buffer is a buffer that is not required to be contiguously or fully backed. This means that a buffer larger than the GPU’s available memory can be created, and only some parts of it are utilized at any given time. Because of the non-resident nature of the backing memory, they can never be mapped, instead needing to go through a staging buffer for any host read/write.
In a gallium-based driver, provided that an effective implementation for staging buffers exists, sparse buffer implementation goes almost exclusively through the pipe_context::resource_commit hook, which manages residency of a sparse resource’s backing memory, passing a range to change residency for and an on/off switch.
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Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That - Phoronix
In the open-source world there can even be much fragmentation and multiple implementations around something as central as parsing of EDID blobs for monitor (display) information and that's only been made worse by the growing number of Wayland compositors.
Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. The Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) is exposed by the kernel to user-space for offering various metadata around the display. This offers much more information in the standardized structure than what the kernel otherwise normally exposes to user-space and is becoming more important for advanced features like high dynamic range (HDR) and advanced color features that are relevant to compositors and other user-space software. (Heck even to reliably query the monitor(s) model string under Linux for the Phoronix Test Suite for years has meant just parsing the EDID information via sysfs.)
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AVX / AVX2 / AVX-512 Performance + Power On Intel Rocket Lake
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 7th of April 2021 03:44:19 PM Filed under
Here is a look at the AVX / AVX2 / AVX-512 performance on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" when building a set of relevant open-source benchmarks limited to AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512 caps each time while also monitoring the CPU package power consumption during the tests for looking at the performance-per-Watt in providing some fresh reference metrics over AVX-512 on Linux with the latest Intel "Rocket Lake" processors.
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Apps to Monitor GPUs Using Open Source Drivers in Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 7th of April 2021 03:29:47 AM Filed under

This article will cover a few useful applications that can be used to monitor statistics about AMD GPUs installed in your Linux system. These applications will only work properly and show correct information if you are using open source AMD GPU drivers (typically called AMDGPU drivers). If you have an AMD GPU, most Linux distributions should install and enable open source drivers automatically during OS installation. Since the release of “RX” series GPUs, open source drivers for AMD cards have improved leaps and bounds and now have performance almost at par with proprietary drivers. You should prefer open source drivers for AMD GPUs unless you are facing some hiccups or exceptions.
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Libinput 1.0.0
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 6th of April 2021 02:07:26 PM Filed under

xf86-input-libinput 1.0.0 is now available. I ran out of fingers counting past 30, hence the version bump to 1.0.0. The driver is now over 7 years old, we might as well pretend the semver has a meaning. The biggest change here is the license change to MIT. Due to an unfortunate copy/paste error, the actual license text used was the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer license. With the ack of the various contributors, the driver is now using the MIT license text as intended. The actual impact is low, the HPND is virtually identical to the MIT license anyway (ianal, consult your legal dept if you have one). The only other notable change: cancelled touch points are now lifted correctly. Where libinput cancels a touch, e.g. in response to a palm being detected, the touch point previously got stuck in the down state. This is fixed now.
Also: Libinput X.Org Driver 1.0 Released Following A License Mixup
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