A little open-source surprise:
Microsoft open sourced MS-DOS 4.0
Very interesting to see.
They've just added it to their existing GitHub repo:
https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
which already included MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0
So after MS-DOS 4.0 has been added, they are all available under the permissive MIT license.
The MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 files were originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th, 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo to make them easier to find, reference-to in external writing and works, and to allow exploration and experimentation for those interested in early PC Operating Systems.
Even though they won't accept pull-requests and want to keep it static.
Noone stops anyone from forking the repo.
All in all:
Great news for preservation.
But only preservation & history - cuz we already have FreeDOS.
Will they eventually keep adding later versions ?
It would be more interesting to release Windows 3.1 as open source.
Might actually happen.
Very interesting would also be the release of windows 95.
Unfortunately very unlikely - I remember they have many legal complications.
The biggest surprise to me is that they actually still found the code.
open-source NVIDIA driver NVK progress
There is a new blog post on Collabora by Developer Faith Ekstrand about the implementation of two extentions in NVK (open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver) and how its results actually fix games.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/04/25/re-converging-control-flow-on-nvidia-gpus/
It is quite a technical deep-dive about the VK_KHR_shader_maximal_reconvergence and VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow extensions..
the flaws initial support from Ekstrand..
and that the extensions have been completely re-done, now.
With examples of rendering in Genshin Impact
(the dark "blocks" in the middle:)
NO MORE! :
Since it fixes issues in one game, it no doubt fixes issues in others too.
And another open-source surprise:
There are new developers for NVK, even NVIDIA devs themselves..
Arthur Huillet who opened a Merge Request titled
"nvk: implement conservative rasterization (all GPUs)"
which implements the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension support, which is important part of what's needed for Direct3D Feature Level 12.1 in VKD3D-Proton.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/28937
Great to see more NVIDIA developers officially contribute to the open source drivers!
Great taste of what's to come.
Imagine AMD, Intel and NVIDIA all having good open source Linux drivers.
That might not actually be a dream for too much longer, it seems.
The NVK progress of the last half year is very impressive!
Very similar to the half a year before the AI boom..
In general, it is very impressive to see how fast open-source software can move in a free, open, voluntary collaboration.
Way faster than closed source software, even if from big companies with top devs.
Open-source is just the future.