Longtime Slashdot reader lazyeye writes: The 53rd release of OpenBSD, version 7.2, has officially been released. Support for new platforms such as the Ampere Altra, Apple M2 chip, and support for Lenovo ThinkPad x13s and other machines using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC are now included, along with various kernel improvements. The announcement with all the details are available at the link [here] from the openbsd-announce mailing list.

Last Friday, Google announced the release of KataOS, a security-minded operating system focused on embedded devices running ambient machine learning workloads. As Phoronix notes, it uses the Rust programming language and is "built atop the seL4 microkernel as its foundatin." From Google's Open-Source Blog: As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Through the seL4 CAmkES framework, we're also able to provide statically-defined and analyzable system components. KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user's privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel's hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows.

The current GitHub release includes most of the KataOS core pieces, including the frameworks we use for Rust (such as the sel4-sys crate, which provides seL4 syscall APIs), an alternate rootserver written in Rust (needed for dynamic system-wide memory management), and the kernel modifications to seL4 that can reclaim the memory used by the rootserver. KataOS code is being worked on via GitHub under the AmbiML umbrella.

The Clearing House, a banking association and payments company owned by the largest commercial banks in the U.S., has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) -- the world's largest patent nonaggression consortium. ZDNet reports: The OIN has long protected Linux and Linux-related software from patent aggression by rival companies. With the increase in patent troll attacks, the OIN is also defending companies from these assaults. You may not think financial companies and banks are subject to such attacks. I mean, TCH's roots go all the way back to 1853. Think again.

As Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, said in June, "The most sophisticated and compelling global banking and fintech companies have essentially become technology companies that employ open-source software to deliver their services at scale." Further, patent trolls "appear to be targeting them for this reason, along with the fact that financial services companies have not historically been active patent filers." That's because, historically, they've purchased most of their tech from third-party vendors.

That was then. This is now. Today, financial institutions generate more tech in-house, so they're more concerned about being granted patents, building patent portfolios, and related patent issues. Indeed, these days fintech businesses have their own Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial sector branch of the Linux Foundation. So, Bergelt said in a release Wednesday, "Advancements in financial services and fintech increasingly rely on open-source technologies. As the most experienced payment company in the US, and a keystone for the financial services industry, we are pleased that The Clearing House is committed to patent nonaggression in core Linux and adjacent open-source technologies."

Pine64 has announced a new "sub $10 Linux capable single board computer" called the Ox64.

Liliputing says the tiny SBC "looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi Pico. But while Raspberry Pi's tiny board is powered by an RP2040 microcontroller, the Ox64 has a dual-core RISC-V processor, 64MB of embedded RAM, and support for up to 128Mb of flash storage plus a microSD card for additional storage." It's expected to support RTOS and Linux and blurs the lines between a microcontroller and a (very low power) single-board PC. It's expected to go on sale in November with prices starting at $6 for an RTOS-ready version of the board and $8 for a Linux-compatible model.

As spotted by CNX Software earlier this month, the board is designed to be a small, inexpensive single-board computer with a RISC-V processor that's aimed at developers.
Pine64's October update also reveals that their Star64 and QuartzPro64 single-board computers "now boot Linux (and run it well too already!)"

Greg Lavender, CTO of Intel, spoke to VentureBeat about the company's efforts to help developers build applications that can run on any operating system. From the report: "Today in the accelerated computing and GPU world, you can use CUDA and then you can only run on an Nvidia GPU, or you can go use AMD's CUDA equivalent running on an AMD GPU,â Lavender told VentureBeat. "You can't use CUDA to program an Intel GPU, so what do you use?" That's where Intel is contributing heavily to the open-source SYCL specification (SYCL is pronounced like "sickle") that aims to do for GPU and accelerated computing what Java did decades ago for application development. Intel's investment in SYCL is not entirely selfless and isn't just about supporting an open-source effort; it's also about helping to steer more development toward its recently released consumer and data center GPUs. SYCL is an approach for data parallel programming in the C++ language and, according to Lavender, it looks a lot like CUDA.

To date, SYCL development has been managed by the Khronos Group, which is a multi-stakeholder organization that is helping to build out standards for parallel computing, virtual reality and 3D graphics. On June 1, Intel acquired Scottish development firm Codeplay Software, which is one of the leading contributors to the SYCL specification. "We should have an open programming language with extensions to C++ that are being standardized, that can run on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs without changing your code," Lavender said. Lavender is also a realist and he knows that there is a lot of code already written specifically for CUDA. That's why Intel developers built an open-source tool called SYCLomatic, which aims to migrate CUDA code into SYCL. Lavender claimed that SYCLomatic today has coverage for approximately 95% of all the functionality that is present in CUDA. He noted that the 5% SYCLomatic doesn't cover are capabilities that are specific to Nvidia hardware.

With SYCL, Lavender said that there are code libraries that developers can use that are device independent. The way that works is code is written by a developer once, and then SYCL can compile the code to work with whatever architecture is needed, be it for an Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU. Looking forward, Lavender said that he's hopeful that SYCL can become a Linux Foundation project, to further enable participation and growth of the open-source effort. [...] "We should have write once, run everywhere for accelerated computing, and then let the market decide which GPU they want to use, and level the playing field," Lavender said.

VideoLAN, the developer and operator of popular media player VLC, has filed a legal notice to India's IT and Telecom ministries, alleging that the Indian bodies failed to notify the software developer prior to blocking the website and did not afford it a chance for an explanation. From a report: Indian telecom operators have been blocking VideoLAN's website, where it lists links to downloading VLC, since February of this year, VideoLan president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf told TechCrunch in an earlier interview. India is one of the largest markets for VLC. "Most major ISPs [internet service providers] are banning the site, with diverse techniques," he said of the blocking in India. The telecom operators began blocking the VideoLan website on February 13 of this year, when the site saw a drop of 80% in traffic from the South Asian market, he said. Now, VideoLAN, in assistance with local advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, is using legal means to get answers and redressal. It has sought a copy of the blocking order for banning VideoLAN website in India and an opportunity to defend the case through a virtual hearing. In the notice, VideoLAN argues that the way Indian ministries have enforced the ban on the website, they violate their own local laws.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A stable version of Linux 6.0 is out, with 15,000 non-merge commits and a notable version number for the kernel. And while major Linux releases only happen when the prior number's dot numbers start looking too big -- there is literally no other reason" -- there are a lot of notable things rolled into this release besides a marking in time. Most notable among them could be a patch that prevents a nearly two-decade slowdown for AMD chips, based on workaround code for power management in the early 2000s that hung around for far too long. [...]

Intel's new Arc GPUs are supported in their discrete laptop form in 6.0 (though still experimental). Linux blog Phoronix notes that Intel's ARC GPUs all seem to run on open source upstream drivers, so support should show up for future Intel cards and chipsets as they arrive on the market. Linux 6.0 includes several hardware drivers of note: fourth-generation Intel Xeon server chips, the not-quite-out 13th-generation Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake chips, AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs, Threadripper CPUs, EPYC systems, and audio drivers for a number of newer AMD systems. One small, quirky addition points to larger things happening inside Linux. Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s, based on an ARM-powered Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, get some early support in 6.0. ARM support is something Linux founder Linus Torvalds is eager to see [...].

Among other changes you can find in Linux 6.0, as compiled by LWN.net (in part one and part two):
- ACPI and power management improvements for Sapphire Rapids CPUs
- Support for SMB3 file transfer inside Samba, while SMB1 is further deprecated
- More work on RISC-V, OpenRISC, and LoongArch technologies
- Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 support, allowing hardware acceleration for machine-learning libraries
- A "guest vCPU stall detector" that can tell a host when a virtual client is frozen Ars' Kevin Purdy notes that in 2022, "there are patches in Linux 6.0 to help Atari's Falcon computers from the early 1990s (or their emulated descendants) better handle VGA modes, color, and other issues."

Not included in this release are Rust improvements, but they "are likely coming in the next point release, 6.1," writes Purdy.

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Debian developers have been figuring out an updated stance to take on non-free firmware considering the increasing number of devices now having open-source Linux drivers but requiring closed-source firmware for any level of functionality. The voting on the non-free firmware matter has now concluded and the votes tallied... The debian votes option 5 as winning: "Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer."

Basically the Debian Installer media will now be allowed to include non-free firmware and to automatically load/use it where necessary while informing the user of it, etc. Considering the state of the hardware ecosystem these days, it's reasonable and common sense since at least users will be able to easily make use of their graphics cards, network adapters, and more. Plus a number of modern CPU security mitigations also requiring the updated closed-source microcode. So all in, I am personally happy with this decision as it will allow for a more pleasant experience for Debian on modern systems and one akin to what is found with other Linux distributions. The solution is described in full via the Debian Wiki.

Speech recognition remains a challenging problem in AI and machine learning. In a step toward solving it, OpenAI today open-sourced Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system that the company claims enables "robust" transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages into English. TechCrunch reports: Countless organizations have developed highly capable speech recognition systems, which sit at the core of software and services from tech giants like Google, Amazon and Meta. But what makes Whisper different, according to OpenAI, is that it was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and "multitask" data collected from the web, which lead to improved recognition of unique accents, background noise and technical jargon.

"The primary intended users of [the Whisper] models are AI researchers studying robustness, generalization, capabilities, biases and constraints of the current model. However, Whisper is also potentially quite useful as an automatic speech recognition solution for developers, especially for English speech recognition," OpenAI wrote in the GitHub repo for Whisper, from where several versions of the system can be downloaded. "[The models] show strong ASR results in ~10 languages. They may exhibit additional capabilities ... if fine-tuned on certain tasks like voice activity detection, speaker classification or speaker diarization but have not been robustly evaluated in these area."

Whisper has its limitations, particularly in the area of text prediction. Because the system was trained on a large amount of "noisy" data, OpenAI cautions Whisper might include words in its transcriptions that weren't actually spoken -- possibly because it's both trying to predict the next word in audio and trying to transcribe the audio itself. Moreover, Whisper doesn't perform equally well across languages, suffering from a higher error rate when it comes to speakers of languages that aren't well-represented in the training data. Despite this, OpenAI sees Whisper's transcription capabilities being used to improve existing accessibility tools.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: When researchers discovered a vulnerability in the ubiquitous open-source log4j system last year that could've affected hundreds of millions of devices, the executive branch snapped into action and major tech companies huddled with the White House. Now, leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are introducing legislation to help secure open-source software, first reported by The Cybersecurity 202. Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and top ranking Republican Rob Portman (Ohio) plan to hold a vote next week on the bill they're co-sponsoring.

The Peters/Portman legislation would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop a way to evaluate and reduce risk in systems that rely on open-source software. Later, CISA would study how that framework could apply to critical infrastructure. The log4j "incident presented a serious threat to federal systems and critical infrastructure companies -- including banks, hospitals, and utilities -- that Americans rely on each and every day for essential services," Peters said in a written statement. "This common-sense, bipartisan legislation will help secure open source software and further fortify our cybersecurity defenses against cybercriminals and foreign adversaries who launch incessant attacks on networks across the nation." Here's how the Peters-Portman legislation works, as outlined in the report: - It directs CISA to hire open-source experts "to the greatest extent practicable."
- It gives the agency a year to publish a framework on open-source code risk. A year later and periodically thereafter, CISA would perform an assessment of open-source code components that federal agencies commonly use.
- Also, two years after publishing the initial framework, CISA would have to study whether it could be used in critical infrastructure outside the government and potentially work with one or more critical infrastructure sectors to voluntarily test the idea.
- Other agencies would have roles as well, such as the Office of Management and Budget publishing guidance to federal chief information officers on secure use of open-source software.

The Document Foundation, the organization that tends the open source productivity suite LibreOffice, has decided to start charging for one version of the software. The Register reports: LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is offered under the free/open source Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. A Monday missive from the Document Foundation reveals the org will begin charging 8.99 euros for the software -- but only when sold via Apple's Mac App Store. That sum has been styled a "convenience fee ... which will be invested to support development of the LibreOffice project."

The foundation suggests paying up in the Mac App Store is ideal for "end users who want to get all of their desktop software from Apple's proprietary sales channel." Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's site will remain available and arguably be superior to the App Store offering, because that version will include Java. The foundation argued that Apple does not permit dependencies in its store, so it cannot include Java in the 8.99 euro offering. The version now sold in the App Store supersedes a previous offering provided by open source support outfit Collabora, which charged $10 for a "Vanilla" version of the suite and threw in three years of support. The foundation's marketing officer Italo Vignoli said the change was part of a "new marketing strategy."

"The Document Foundation is focused on the release of the Community version, while ecosystem companies are focused on a value-added long-term supported versions targeted at enterprises," Vignoli explained. "The distinction has the objective of educating organizations to support the FOSS project by choosing the LibreOffice version which has been optimized for deployments in production and is backed by professional services, and not the Community version generously supported by volunteers."

"The objective is to fulfil the needs of individual and enterprise users in a better way," Vignoli added, before admitting "we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating enterprises about FOSS is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: About 40 percent of industry professionals say their organizations have reduced their usage of open source software due to concerns about security, according to a survey conducted by data science firm Anaconda. The company's 2022 State of Data Science report solicited opinions in April and May from 3,493 individuals from 133 countries and regions, targeting academics, industry professionals, and students. About 16 percent of respondents identified as data scientists. About 33 percent of surveyed industry professionals said they had not scaled back on open source, 7 percent said they had increased usage, and 20 percent said they weren't sure. The remaining 40 percent said they had.

By industry professionals, or commercial respondents as Anaconda puts it, the biz means a data-science-leaning mix of business analysts, product managers, data and machine-learning scientists and engineers, standard IT folks such as systems administrators, and others in technology, finance, consulting, healthcare, and so on. And by scale back, that doesn't mean stop: 87 percent of commercial respondents said their organization still allowed the use of open source. It appears a good number of them, though, are seeking to reducing the risk from relying on too many open source dependencies.

Anaconda's report found that incidents like Log4j and reports of "protestware" prompted users of open source software to take security concerns more seriously. Of the 40 percent who scaled back usage of open source, more than half did so after the Log4j fiasco. Some 31 percent of respondents said security vulnerabilities represent the biggest challenge in the open source community today. Most organizations use open source software, according to Anaconda. But among the 8 percent of respondents indicating that they don't, more than half (54 percent, up 13 percent since last year) cited security risks as the reason. Other reasons for not using open source software include: lack of understanding (38 percent); lack of confidence in organizational IT governance (29 percent); "open-source software is deemed insecure, so it's not allowed" (28 percent); and not wanting to disrupt current projects (26 percent).

The Linux Foundation has announced plans for a new collaborative initiative designed to support interoperability across digital wallets, built on an open source bedrock. From a report: The OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), as the new effort is called, is the brainchild of Daniel Goldscheider, CEO of open banking startup Yes.com, though today's announcement reveals a broad gamut of buy-ins from multiple industry players including Okta, Ping Identity, Accenture, CVS Health, OpenID Foundation, among several other public and private bodies. With the Linux Foundation serving as the project's host, this gives OWF sizeable clout as it strives to enable what Goldscheider calls a "plurarity of wallets based on a common core," according to a press release. The news also comes as regulatory bodies across the globe are moving to support competition through enforcing interoperability across systems, including Europe which is currently trying to make messaging interoperability a thing.

Hammeh writes: PyTorch, the open source AI framework led by Meta researchers, is to become a project governed under the Linux Foundation. It moves governance of the project to a neutral home, with the promise of greater trust to act as a catalyst for more rapid development.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Proposed EU rules could limit the type of research that produces cutting-edge AI tools like GPT-3, experts warn in a new study. The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc's regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. Under the EU's draft AI Act, open source developers would have to adhere to guidelines for risk management, data governance, technical documentation and transparency, as well as standards of accuracy and cybersecurity.

If a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome, the author asserts, it's not inconceivable the company could attempt to deflect responsibility by suing the open source developers on which they built their product. "This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public's understanding of AI," Alex Engler, the analyst at Brookings who published the piece, wrote. "In the end, the [E.U.'s] attempt to regulate open-source could create a convoluted set of requirements that endangers open-source AI contributors, likely without improving use of general-purpose AI."

In 2021, the European Commission -- the EU's politically independent executive arm -- released the text of the AI Act, which aims to promote "trustworthy AI" deployment in the EU as they solicit input from industry ahead of a vote this fall, EU. institutions are seeking to make amendments to the regulations that attempt to balance innovation with accountability. But according to some experts, the AI Act as written would impose onerous requirements on open efforts to develop AI systems. The legislation contains carve-outs for some categories of open source AI, like those exclusively used for research and with controls to prevent misuse. But as Engler notes, it'd be difficult -- if not impossible -- to prevent these projects from making their way into commercial systems, where they could be abused by malicious actors. "The road to regulation hell is paved with the EU's good intentions," said Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. "Open source developers should not be subject to the same burden as those developing commercial software. It should always be the case that free software can be provided 'as is' -- consider the case of a single student developing an AI capability; they cannot afford to comply with EU regulations and may be forced not to distribute their software, thereby having a chilling effect on academic progress and on reproducibility of scientific results."

Instead, Etzioni argues that EU regulators should focus on specific applications of AI. "There is too much uncertainty and rapid change in AI for the slow-moving regulatory process to be effective. Instead, AI applications such as autonomous vehicles, bots, or toys should be the subject of regulation."

Proposed E.U. rules could limit the type of research that produces cutting-edge AI tools like GPT-3, experts warn in a new study. From a report: The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc's regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. Under the E.U.'s draft AI Act, open source developers would have to adhere to guidelines for risk management, data governance, technical documentation and transparency, as well as standards of accuracy and cybersecurity. If a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome, the author asserts, it's not inconceivable the company could attempt to deflect responsibility by suing the open source developers on which they built their product.

"This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public's understanding of AI," Alex Engler, the analyst at Brookings who published the piece, wrote. "In the end, the [E.U.'s] attempt to regulate open-source could create a convoluted set of requirements that endangers open-source AI contributors, likely without improving use of general-purpose AI." In 2021, the European Commission -- the E.U.'s politically independent executive arm -- released the text of the AI Act, which aims to promote "trustworthy AI" deployment in the E.U. As they solicit input from industry ahead of a vote this fall, E.U. institutions are seeking to make amendments to the regulations that attempt to balance innovation with accountability. But according to some experts, the AI Act as written would impose onerous requirements on open efforts to develop AI systems. The legislation contains carve-outs for some categories of open source AI, like those exclusively used for research and with controls to prevent misuse. But as Engler notes, it'd be difficult -- if not impossible -- to prevent these projects from making their way into commercial systems, where they could be abused by malicious actors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new company from the creators of the Godot game engine is setting out to grab a piece of the $200 billion global video game market -- and to do so, it's taking a cue from commercial open source software giant Red Hat. Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. Today, Godot claims some 1,500 contributors, and is considered one of the world's top open source projects by various metrics. Godot has been used in high-profile games such as the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster, published by Sega last year as the first major mainstream game powered by Godot. But Tesla, too, has apparently used Godot to power some of the more graphically intensive animations in its mobile app.

Among Godot's founding creators is Juan Linietsky, who has served as head of development for the Godot project for the past 13 years, and who will now serve as CEO of W4 Games, a new venture that's setting out to take Godot to the next level. W4 quietly exited stealth last week, but today the Ireland-headquartered company has divulged more details about its goals to grow Godot and make it accessible for a wider array of commercial use cases. On top of that, the company told TechCrunch that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to make its mission a reality, with backers including OSS Capital, Lux Capital, Sisu Game Ventures and -- somewhat notably -- Bob Young, the co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat, an enterprise-focused open source company that IBM went on to acquire for $34 billion in 2019.

[...] "Companies like Red Hat have proven that with the right commercial offerings on top, the appeal of using open source in enterprise environments is enormous," Linietsky said. "W4 intends to do this very same thing for the game industry." In truth, Godot is nowhere near having the kind of impact in gaming that Linux has had in the enterprise, but it's still early days -- and this is exactly where W4 could make a difference. [...] W4's core target market will be broad -- it's gunning for independent developers and small studios, as well as medium and large gaming companies. The problem that it's looking to solve, ultimately, is that while Godot is popular with hobbyists and indie developers, companies are hesitant to use the engine on commercial projects due to its inherent limitations -- currently, there is no easy way to garner technical support, discuss the product's development roadmap, or access any other kind of value-added service. [...]

"W4 will offer console ports to developers under very accessible terms," Linietsky said. "Independent developers won't need to pay upfront to publish, while for larger companies there will be commercial packages that include support." Elsewhere, W4 is developing a range of products and services which it's currently keeping under wraps, with Linietsky noting that they will most likely be announced at Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next March. "The aim of W4 is to help developers overcome any problem developers may stumble upon while trying to use Godot commercially," Linietsky added. It's worth noting that there are a handful of commercial companies out there already, such as Lone Wolf Technology and Pineapple Works, that help developers get the most out of Godot -- including console porting. But Linietsky was keen to highlight one core difference between W4 and these incumbents: its expertise. "The main distinctive feature of W4 is that it has been created by the Godot project leadership, which are the individuals with the most understanding and insight about Godot and its community," he said.

Version 9.3 of NetBSD is here, able to run on very low-end systems and with that authentic early-1990s experience. The Register reports: Version 9.3 comes some 15 months after NetBSD 9.2 and boasts new and updated drivers, improved hardware support, including for some recent AMD and Intel processors, and better handling of suspend and resume. The next sentence in the release announcement, though, might give some readers pause: "Support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga." This is your clue that we are in a rather different territory from run-of-the-mill PC operating systems here. A notable improvement in NetBSD 9.3 is being able to run a graphical desktop on an Amiga. This is a 2022 operating system that can run on late-1980s hardware, and there are not many of those around.

NetBSD supports eight "tier I" architectures: 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus MIPS, PowerPC, Sun UltraSPARC, and the Xen hypervisor. Alongside those, there are no less than 49 "tier II" supported architectures, which are not as complete and not everything works -- although almost all of them are on version 9.3 except for the version for original Acorn computers with 32-bit Arm CPUs, which is still only on NetBSD 8.1. There's also a "tier III" for ports which are on "life support" so there may be a risk Archimedes support could drop to that. This is an OS that can run on 680x0 hardware, DEC VAX minicomputers and workstations, and Sun 2, 3, and 32-bit SPARC boxes. In other words, it reaches back as far as some 1970s hardware. Let this govern your expectations. For instance, in VirtualBox, if you tell it you want to create a NetBSD guest, it disables SMP support.

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: To NVIDIA's Open-GPU-Docs portal they have posted the 73k lines worth of 3D class header files covering RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs back through the decade-old GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors. These header files define the classes used to program the 3D engine of the GPU, the texture header and texture sampler layout are documented, and other 3D-related programming bits. Having all of these header files will be useful to the open-source Nouveau driver developers to save on their reverse-engineering and guessing/uncertainty over certain bits.

NVIDIA's Open GPU Kernel Driver is for only GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" series and newer, so it's great seeing NVIDIA now posting this documentation going back to Fermi which is squarely to help the open-source community / Nouveau. [...] The timing of NVIDIA opening these 3D classes back to Fermi is interesting and potentially tied to SIGGRAPH 2022 happening this week. Those wanting to grab NVIDIA's latest open-source GPU documentation can find it via this GitHub repository.

With annual CG confab SIGGRAPH slated to start Monday in Vancouver, DreamWorks Animation announced its intent to release its proprietary renderer, MoonRay, as open-source software later this year. Hollywood Reporter reports: MoonRay has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Croods: A New Age, The Bad Guys and upcoming Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. MoonRay uses DreamWorks' distributed computation framework, Arras, also to be included in the open-source code base.

"We are thrilled to share with the industry over 10 years of innovation and development on MoonRay's vectorized, threaded, parallel, and distributed code base," said Andrew Pearce, DWA's vp of global technology. "The appetite for rendering at scale grows each year, and MoonRay is set to meet that need. We expect to see the code base grow stronger with community involvement as DreamWorks continues to demonstrate our commitment to open source."