Compute module and dev kit aim Snapdragon 865 at AR/VR

Lantronix has launched 50 x 29mm “Open-Q 865XR SOM” and $995 dev kit that runs Android 10 on a 15-TOPS NPU equipped Snapdragon 865 with 6GB LPDDR5, 802.11ax, and triple MIPI-CSI interfaces. Intrinsyc, a subsidiary of Lantronix, has introduced an IoT-oriented compute module and development kit based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 (SXR2130P) SoC. The $445 Open-Q 865XR SOM and $995 Open-Q 865XR SOM Development Kit follow Intrinsyc’s more smartphone-oriented Snapdragon 865 Mobile HDK. The Open-Q 865XR targets imaging intensive embedded applications including Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications in AI machine learning, medical, gaming, logistics and retail sectors.

Programming: Git and Qt

• Understand the new GitLab Kubernetes Agent

  GitLab's current Kubernetes integrations were introduced more than three years ago. Their primary goal was to allow a simple setup of clusters and provide a smooth deployment experience to our users. These integrations served us well in the past years but at the same time its weaknesses were limiting for some important and crucial use cases.

• GitLab Introduces the GitLab Kubernetes Agent

  The GitLab Kubernetes Agent (GKA), released in GitLab 13.4, provides a permanent communication channel between GitLab and the cluster. According to the GitLab blog, it is designed to provide a secure solution that allows cluster operators to restrict GitLab's rights in the cluster and does not require opening up the cluster to the Internet.

• Git Protocol v2 Available at Launchpad

  After a few weeks of development and testing, we are proud to finally announce that Git protocol v2 is available at Launchpad! But what are the improvements in the protocol itself, and how can you benefit from that? The git v2 protocol was released a while ago, in May 2018, with the intent of simplifying git over HTTP transfer protocol, allowing extensibility of git capabilities, and reducing the network usage in some operations. For the end user, the main clear benefit is the bandwidth reduction: in the previous version of the protocol, when one does a “git pull origin master”, for example, even if you have no new commits to fetch from the remote origin, git server would first “advertise” to the client all refs (branches and tags) available. In big repositories with hundreds or thousands of refs, this simple handshake operation could consume a lot of bandwidth and time to communicate a bunch of data that would potentially be discarded by the client after. In the v2 protocol, this waste is no longer present: the client now has the ability to filter which refs it wants to know about before the server starts advertising it.

• Qt Desktop Days 7-11 September

  We are happy to let you know that the very first edition of Qt Desktop Days 2020 was a great success! Having pulled together the event at very short notice, we were delighted at the enthusiastic response from contributors and attendees alike.

• Full Stack Tracing Part 1

  Full stack tracing is a tool that should be part of every software engineer’s toolkit. It’s the best way to investigate and solve certain classes of hard problems in optimization and debugging. Because of the power and capability it gives the developer, we’ll be writing a series of blogs about it: when to use it, how to get it set up, how to create traces, and how to interpret results. Our goal is to get you capable enough to use full stack tracing to solve your tough problems too. Firstly, what is it? Full stack tracing is tracing on the full software stack, from the operating system to the application. By collecting profiling information (timing, process, caller, API, and other info) from the kernel, drivers, software frameworks, application, and JavaScript environments, you’re able to see exactly how the individual components of a system are interacting. That opens up areas of investigation that are impossible to achieve with standard application profilers, kernel debug messages, or even strategically inserted printf() commands. One way to think of full stack tracing is like a developer’s MRI machine that allows you to look into a running system without disturbing it to determine what is happening inside. (And unlike other low-level traces that we’ve written about before, full stack tracing provides a simpler way to view activity up and down the entire software stack.)

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Gets 11th-Gen Intel Refresh, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

The revised model doesn’t buck any conventions. It’s a refreshed version of the XPS 13 model released earlier this year, albeit offering the latest 11th generation Intel processors, Intel Iris Xe graphics, Thunderbolt 4 ports, and up to 32GB 4267MHz LPDDR4x RAM. These are also the first Dell portables to carry Intel “Evo” certification. What’s Intel Evo? Think of it as an assurance. Evo certified notebooks have 11th gen Intel chips, can wake from sleep in under 1s, offer at least 9 hours battery life (with a Full HD screen), and support fast charging (with up to 4 hours from a single 30 min charge) — if they can’t meet any of those criteria they don’t get certified.

Vulkan 1.2.155 Released and AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 Vulkan Driver Brings Several Fixes

• Vulkan 1.2.155 Released With EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64

  Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs. Vulkan 1.2.155 is quite a tiny release after that big release last week, but there aren't even any documentation corrections/clarifications and just a sole new extension.

• AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 Vulkan Driver Brings Several Fixes

  AMD driver developers today released AMDVLK 2020.Q3.6 as their latest open-source snapshot of their official Vulkan graphics driver. The primary new feature of this AMDVLK driver update is VK_EXT_robustness2, which mandates stricter requirements around dealing with out-of-bounds reads/writes. Robustness2 requires greater bounds checking, discarding out-of-bounds writes, and out-of-bounds reads must return zero. This extension debuted back in April as part of Vulkan 1.2.139.