Kernel: Rust, Monado/OpenXR, and More
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Linux 6.1 Officially Adds Support for Rust in the Kernel
After over two years in development, support for using Rust for kernel development has entered a stable Linux release, Linux 6.1, which became available a couple of weeks ago.
Previous to its official release, Rust support has been available in linux-next, the git tree resulting from merging all of the developers and maintainers trees, for over a year. With the stable release, Rust has become the second language officially accepted for Linux kernel development, along with C.
Initial Rust support is just the absolute minimum to get Rust code building in the kernel, say Rust for Linux maintainers. This possibly means that Rust support is not ready yet for prime-time development and that a number of changes at the infrastructure level are to be expected in coming releases. Still, there has been quite some work work going on on a few actual drivers that should become available in the next future. These include a Rust nvme driver, a 9p server, and Apple Silicon GPU drivers.
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State of Monado's visual-inertial tracking
After a two-year hiatus, FOSS XR took place in Minneapolis this past October. Besides being a wonderful place to come together and meet many different awesome people working on open-source XR, the conference held several talks directly related to Monado, our open-source OpenXR runtime. In this post, I'll focus on summarizing some of the key points of the "Visual-inertial tracking for Monado" talk as an overview of its current state.
In my last blog post, I took a more in-depth look at the details of integrating visual-inertial tracking solutions with Monado and why it was an important component to build. The gist is that new headsets have been coming with only cameras and IMUs as their sensors for tracking, and there hasn't been a clear alternative to their proprietary tracking solutions. Although still not meant for final users, thanks to this module (and thanks to Basalt in particular), we can now get OpenXR apps tracked on a totally open-source software stack on Linux.
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AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs Showcase Strong Performance Improvement With AVX-512 At The Same Power
AMD's EPYC 9004 Genoa CPUs have been tested in various AVX-512 benchmarks by Phoronix and it looks like the latest Zen 4 parts deliver a big boost in performance while retaining the same power.