After five months of active maintenance and long bugs triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.4.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

Back at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled their highly anticipated Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture during AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su's opening keynote. AMD announced not one but two new client platforms that will utilize the latest Zen 5 cores. This includes AMD's latest AI PC-focused chip family for the laptop market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In comparison, the Ryzen 9000 series caters to the desktop market, which uses the preexisting AM5 platform.

Built around the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with some fundamental improvements to both graphics and AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 series, code-named Strix Point, is set to deliver improvements in several areas. The Ryzen AI 300 series looks set to add another footnote in the march towards the AI PC with its mobile SoC featuring a new XDNA 2 NPU, from which AMD promises 50 TOPS of performance. AMD has also upgraded the integrated graphics with the RDNA 3.5, which is designed to replace the last generation of RDNA 3 mobile graphics, for better performance in games than we've seen before.

Further to this, during AMD's recent Tech Day last week, AMD disclosed some of the technical details regarding Zen 5, which also covers a number of key elements under the hood on both the Ryzen AI 300 and the Ryzen 9000 series. On paper, the Zen 5 architecture looks quite a big step up compared to Zen 4, with the key component driving Zen 5 forward through higher instructions per cycle than its predecessor, which is something AMD has managed to do consistently from Zen to Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, and now Zen 5.

Zen 5 marks the fifth generation of AMD's winning Zen series CPU microarchitectures that have turned a once written-off company in the processor market back to competitiveness. It seems like just a couple of years have gone by, but AMD Zen is now into its seventh year, and the company has transitioned two desktop sockets, five chipset series, and seven processor lines. The new Zen 5 microarchitecture powers the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" processors on the desktop, the all important Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" processors on notebooks, and the 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processors. AMD is planning to launch the new server processors a little later this year, but has dedicated Summer 2024 to its client segment—desktops and notebooks.

The new Zen 5 microarchitecture builds on AMD's proven CPU core technology, and doesn't try anything fancy like its generational counterpart from Intel, the Lion Cove P-core used on Arrow Lake. Zen 5 still brings a double-digit percentage IPC gain over the previous generation, and introduces several efficiency improvements over Zen 4 thanks not just to its newer 4 nm process, but also a host of other innovations. AMD was able to increase clock speeds, and lower TDP across the desktop processor lineup, while still achieving good performance gains.

A new CachyOS snapshot for July 2024 is out today with various improvements and some exciting new features, especially for AMD users, as well as the usual bug fixes and other changes to improve your experience.

Starting with this release, CachyOS will automatically enable a software repository on new installations that will be used to provide the best performance for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 machines. In addition, the ISO now features automatic architecture checks for the Zen 4/Zen 5 repository and CachyOS’s hardware detection tool (chwd) received support for AMD GPUs for better detection of official ROCm-supported GPUs.

Petra Molnar is an anthropologist and attorney focused on human rights and migration. Molnar, who is based in Toronto, serves as the associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab and as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She has worked on migrant justice causes since 2008, first assisting directly with families resettling in Canada and now as a lawyer and researcher. She is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a book published by The New Press in May exploring surveillance technology along borders across the world, including at the U.S.-Mexico divide. Molnar spoke with the Texas Observer about surveillance tech and borders as a testing ground.

It’s been over a year since Khronos started working on the Vulkan SC Ecosystem. Now that the component stack has reached a high level of maturity, it seemed appropriate to write an article about the secret sauce behind the Vulkan SC Ecosystem components that enabled us to leverage the industry-proven Vulkan Ecosystem components to provide corresponding developer tooling for the safety-critical variant of the API.

Vulkan SC was released by the Khronos Group in 2022 as the first of the new generation of explicit APIs to target safety-critical systems. The Vulkan SC 1.0 specification is based on the Vulkan 1.2 API and aims to enable safety-critical application developers access to and detailed control of the graphics and compute capabilities of modern GPUs. In order to accomplish that, Vulkan SC removes functionality from Vulkan 1.2 that is not applicable, not relevant, or otherwise not essential for safety-critical markets, and tweaks the APIs to achieve even more deterministic and robust behavior to meet safety certification standards.

The Vulkan SC Ecosystem components, such as the ICD Loader and Validation Layers, are not safety certified software components themselves, rather, they are developer tools intended to be used by application developers writing safety-critical applications using the Vulkan SC API. Building on the success of the corresponding ecosystem components available for the Vulkan API, the goal for the Vulkan SC Ecosystem is to leverage the tremendous engineering effort that went (and still goes) into those in order to create a comparably comprehensive suite of developer tools for the safety-critical variant of the API, amended with additional features specific to Vulkan SC. Reaching that goal, however, came with its own set of challenges…

Let’s talk today about kernel crashes, or even better, how can we collect information if a kernel panic happens on Arch Linux and on SteamOS, the Linux distribution used on the Steam Deck.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17571041

Codevis is a Large Scale software visualizer, focused on C++ codebases. it can help you identify issues and smells in your codebase. It also has an extensive plugin interface and some preliminary scripting support.

Features:

• Generate a Visualization from Pre-Existing code
• Generate architectural code from a visualization
• Plugin System that allows you to add missing features
• Architectural linters (not just code linters)
• DBus support

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18408267

On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.

Much have been said about the need to pay Open Source developers for their work and the fact that huge corporations use open source software without contributing back.

Most articles I’ve been reading on the subject completely miss the mark. Plenty of commentators try to reinvent some kind of "free software but with forced contributions" or "free software but non-commercial". Those are naive and wrong. If you impose limitations, it’s, by definition, not free software anymore.

The problem is not about Open Source or Free Software. The problem is everything else.