NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules repo on GitHub. This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back. For Linux distribution providers, the open-source modules increase ease of use.

They also improve the out-of-the-box user experience to sign and distribute the NVIDIA GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are able to immediately package the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Distributions. Developers can trace into code paths and see how kernel event scheduling is interacting with their workload for faster root cause debugging. In addition, enterprise software developers can now integrate the driver seamlessly into the customized Linux kernel configured for their project.

With the x86 architecture, large hyperscale cloud providers have been experiencing all sorts of troubles, from high power consumption to the high pricing structure of these processors. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) build their processors based on 3rd party instruction set architecture designs. Today, Alibaba, the Chinese giant, has announced the launch of two processors made in-house to serve everything from edge to central server processing. First in line is the RISC-V-based Xuantie series of processors, which can run anything from AliOS, FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, Linux, Android, etc., to other operating systems as well. These processors are open-source, capable of modest processing capabilities, and designed as IPs that anyone can use. You can check them out on T-Head GitHub repositories here.

The other thing that Alibaba announced is the development of a 128-core custom processor based on the Arm architecture. Called Yitian 710 server SoC, TSMC manufactures it on the company on 5 nm semiconductor node. So far, Alibaba didn't reveal any details about the SoC and what Arm cores are used. However, this signifies that the company seeks technology independence from outside sources and wants to take it all in-house. With custom RISC-V processors for lower-power tasks and custom Arm server CPUs, the whole infrastructure is covered. It is just a matter of time before Alibaba starts to replace x86 makers in full. However, given the significant number of chips that the company needs, it may not happen at any sooner date.

Some of you might remember Intel's Upgrade Service, aka software locked CPUs that launched back in 2010 with the Pentium G6951 that could have an extra 1 MB of cache and Hyper-Threading unlocked for a mere $50. Well, it seems like Intel is working on something similar, but for Xeon CPUs this time around, although the exact details aren't clear as yet.

Phoronix spotted a Linux patch on GitHub for something called Intel Software Defined Silicon or SDSi for short. It's clear that it's for Xeon CPUs and the GitHub page mentions that SDSi "allows the configuration of additional CPU features through a license activation process." There's very little to go by beyond this, but it's not hard to draw parallels with Intel's Upgrade Service from last decade, just this time Intel is targeting its business customers rather than consumers.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

Microsoft has acknowledged the existence of a severe and currently unpatched vulnerability in Windows' Print Spooler service (CVE-2021-34527). The vulnerability affects all versions of Windows, and is being actively exploited as per Microsoft. Poetically named "PrintNightmare", the vulnerability was published earlier this week as a PoC (Proof of Concept) exploit by security researchers, which believed the flaw had already been addressed by Microsoft at time of release (the company patched up another Print Spooler vulnerability issue with the June 2021 security patch). The code was made public and quickly scrapped when developers realized it gave would-be bad actors access to an unpatched way into users' systems - but since it's the Internet, the code had already been forked in GitHub.

The vulnerability isn't rated by the Windows developer as of yet, but it's one of the bad ones: it allows attackers to remotely execute code with system-level privileges. This is the ultimate level of security vulnerability that could exist. Microsoft is currently investigating the issue and developing a patch; however, given the urgency in closing down this exploit, the company is recommending disabling of the Windows Print Spooler service wherever possible, or at least disabling inbound remote printing through Group Policy. If you don't have a printer, just disable the service; if you do, please disable the Group Policy as per the steps outlined in the image below.

Grand Theft Auto Online is notorious for its long loading times so when a fan-made fix managed to reduce these load times by 70 percent there was much excitement and confusion. The programmer who goes by the name t0st investigated why the game could take upwards of 5 minutes to load and found that the game performed nearly 2 billion mostly useless item checks when starting. A fix was created by t0st which eliminated these useless checks and improved loading times from six minutes down to one minute and 50 seconds. The fix was publicly shared online via GitHub and Rockstar has since been in contact with t0st to discuss the fix and have confirmed they will be implementing a version of it in a future update. Rockstar awarded the maximum amount of 10,000 USD for the discovery through their bug-bounty program.

GitHub serves as a repository for collaborative work in software development, with numerous open-source projects available and worked on by numerous coders, would-be coders, and others. It has been a paragon for a more open internet, with more open standards, and allowing for actual community-based troubleshoot and development. And it does so for anyone around the world.

However, China's efforts to decouple from its dependencies on the Western world for anything technologically-related has been a reason for the country to invest not only on infrastructure and silicon manufacturing, but also in programming and all of the related branches of the technology tree. Recent events initiated by Microsoft (which now owns GitHub) via severing connections to its GitHub repositories for various US-sanctioned countries such as Iran, Syria and Crimea clearly showed what dependencies on foreign-guaranteed resources can do to technological development. China wants to have an answer to that.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that realistically simulates how light rays intersect and interact with scene geometry, materials, and light sources to generate photorealistic imagery. It is widely used for film and other production rendering and is beginning to be practical for real-time applications and games. Vulkan Ray Tracing seamlessly integrates a coherent ray tracing framework into the Vulkan API, enabling a flexible merging of rasterization and ray tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic and so can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute and dedicated ray tracing cores if available.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.

Unity Engine powers a lot of games across platforms. The game engine includes a telemetry module that dials home every few minutes (depending on the game), pushing usage data and crash reports (if any). Some games, such as "Kerbal Space Program," allow you to opt-out from this telemetry, but even then the engine is known to dial home at game startup and at longer intervals, with far less amount of data.

TechPowerUp Forums member by the night and software developer by the day "R-T-B" created a nifty utility that can modify your game to completely strip it off Unity Engine telemetry, called UnityAnalyticsKiller. "Stop spying on my kerbals," reads the utility's GitHub page, describing UnityAnalyticsKiller as a game library replacement along with a ReadMe with some basic instructions. You can also inspect its source and build it by yourself if you're curious. R-T-B invites gamers and developers to test the utility and offer feedback in the TechPowerUp Forums thread here.

DOWNLOAD: UnityAnalyticsKiller by R-T-B

Eliovp, who describes himself on GitHub as a Belgian [crypto] mining enthusiast, created what could go down as the best thing that happened to AMD Radeon users all decade. The AMD Memory Tweak Tool is a Windows and Linux based GUI utility that lets you not just overclock AMD Radeon graphics card memory on the fly, but also lets you tweak its memory timings. Most timings apply live, while your machine is running within Windows/Linux GUI, some require memory retraining via a reboot, which means they can't be changed at this time, because rebooting reverts the timings to default. The author is trying to figure out a way to run memory training at runtime, which would let you change those timings, too, in the future. While you're at it, the tool also lets you play with GPU core frequency and fan-control.

The AMD Memory Tweak tool supports both Windows and Linux (GUI), and works with all recent AMD Radeon GPUs with GDDR5 and HBM2 memory types. It requires Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.4.1 or later in case of Windows, or amdgpu-pro ROCM to be actively handling the GPU in case of Linux. The Linux version further has some dependencies, such as pciutils-dev, libpci-dev, build-essential, and git. The source-code for the utility is up on GitHub for you to inspect and test.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Memory Tweak Tool by Eliovp

GitHub developer jgbit has started an open-source project called VUDA, which takes inspiration from NVIDIA's CUDA API to bring an easily accessible GPU compute interface to the open-source world. VUDA is implemented as wrapper on top of the highly popular next-gen graphics API Vulkan, which provides low-level access to hardware. VUDA comes as header-only C++ library, which means it's compatible with all platforms that have a C++ compiler and that support Vulkan.

While the project is still young, its potential is enormous, especially due to the open source nature (using the MIT license). The page on GitHub comes with a (very basic) sample, that could be a good start for using the library.

Considering Microsoft only recently acquired GitHub, it took them no time at all to put the software development platform to good use. Accordingly, the Redmond-based IT giant has set up an online repository from which they could re-release versions 1.25 and 2.0 of MS-DOS. According to Rich Turner, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, it is "much easier to find, read, and refer to MS-DOS source files if they're in a GitHub repo than in the original downloadable compressed archive file." The compressed archive Turner mentions is the original release of the source code from 2014 when both versions of MS-DOS were first made available via the Computer History Museum after their discovery by Tim Paterson. This is fitting considering Paterson is the original author of 86-DOS, which forms the basis for MS-DOS.

Microsoft has stated that they will ignore any pull requests or changes to the original source code, with the repository instead being kept static more as a historical reference to be used in literature. That said, users are more than welcome to create separate development forks for exploration and experimentation. When it comes to yours truly, while I don't plan to do much experimenting, this has created an itch to relive the past. Maybe I should dust off that old MS-DOS system in the garage and see if it still works.

Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world's leading software development platform where more than 28 million developers learn, share and collaborate to create the future. Together, the two companies will empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft's developer tools and services to new audiences.

"Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world's most pressing challenges."

In a move that could significantly shake up the software industry, reports are emerging that Microsoft may have acquired GitHub, and that an announcement to that effect could be made on Monday (4th June). A 2015 valuation of GitHub put it at USD $2 billion, but it's not clear at what price Redmond struck this deal. GitHub had been struggling for the past few quarters and hadn't appointed a full-time CEO since the departure of Chris Wanstrath in August 2017.

This deal could have sweeping ramifications on the software industry because proprietary software companies use GitHub for private repositories of software source-code, so their developer teams spread across the globe could collaborate (they now have to content with Microsoft owning GitHub); and for ideologically-charged free software (and OSS) developers to continue to run their projects on GitHub. Microsoft has been a top contributor on GitHub, with over 1,000 employees pushing code to public and non-public projects on the platform.