Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day. 4 Hours Ago - X.Org - XDC 2020 + Microsoft

Mesa 20.1.8 Released While Waiting For Mesa 20.2 Mesa 20.2 (or 20.2-RC5) didn't debut last week as intended, but for the interim the Mesa 20.1.x release cycle brought 20.1.8 on Wednesday and now it's been extended to having at least a ninth point release to allow more time until not only Mesa 20.2.0 to ship but Mesa 20.2.1 alignment. 6 Hours Ago - Mesa - Mesa 20.1.8

GNOME 40 Aims To Have A Better Extensions Experience Following Wednesday's release of GNOME 3.38 was the surprising news of GNOME 40 being the next version as well as a new initiative to improve GNOME extensions. 7 Hours Ago - GNOME - GNOME 40 Extensions

16 September

Ray-Tracing Support For AMDGPU LLVM Back-End Lands For RDNA 2 AMD previously confirmed it would be supporting real-time ray-tracing with their next-generation GPUs while now one month out from the Radeon RX 6000 series debut are the first signs of the open-source driver work around GPU ray-tracing. 16 September 06:38 PM EDT - Radeon - GFX103 RT

Arm Is Now Backing Panfrost Gallium3D As Open-Source Mali Graphics Driver Most information presented during the annual X.Org Developers' Conference doesn't tend to be very surprising or ushering in breaking news, but during today's XDC2020 it was subtly dropped that Arm Holdings appears to now be backing the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver. 16 September 05:05 PM EDT - X.Org - Panfrost

Gamescope Continues Advancing As Wayland/Vulkan Compositor Backed By Valve Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS. 16 September 02:23 PM EDT - Valve - Gamescope

Optional L1d Flushing On Context Switching Looks Like It Will Try Again For Linux 5.10 The feature to provide opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on each context switch looks like it will be coming with the Linux 5.10 cycle for this functionality providing security benefits but at the cost of further performance degradation. 16 September 02:00 PM EDT - Intel - L1d Flush On Context Switch

GNOME 3.38 Released With Many New Features, Better Performance GNOME 3.38 has shipped as the newest half-year update to this desktop environment and will be featured in the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33, and other autumn Linux distribution updates. 16 September 10:38 AM EDT - GNOME - GNOME 3.38

After Reaching Vulkan 1.0 Conformance, V3DV Raspberry Pi Vulkan To Pursue Mainline Mesa The V3DV driver for providing Vulkan support on the Raspberry Pi 4 is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance and once squaring that away along with other lingering bits they will be pursuing the upstreaming of this driver within Mesa. 16 September 09:18 AM EDT - Vulkan - V3DV

X.Org Developers Conference 2020 Starts With Many Interesting Talks XDC2020 as the annual gathering of X.Org developers was due to take place in Poland this year but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to be yet another conference happening exclusively online. Day 1 of XDC2020 has just begun. 16 September 07:00 AM EDT - X.Org - XDC 2020

LZHAM + Crunch Now Placed Under The Public Domain Compression expert Rich Geldreich who previously worked for the likes of Valve and Unity prior to co-founding his own consulting firm has now made the Crunch and LZHAM technologies available under the public domain. 16 September 06:50 AM EDT - Programming - Crunching On Some LZHAM

Rav1e 0.4 Alpha Released With Much Faster Performance For Rust AV1 Encoding After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today. 16 September 06:35 AM EDT - Multimedia - Rav1e 0.4 Alpha

Gentoo Offers Up New Easy Kernel Options Gentoo Linux is looking to improve the kernel maintenance experience by offering up Ebuilds that make it easier to maintain the kernel through the package manager -- including prebuilt binary kernels. 16 September 06:26 AM EDT - Operating Systems - Kernel Ebuilds

15 September

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Linux Driver/Support Expectations We still don't have our hands on the GeForce RTX 3080 yet and remains to be seen when we will get our hands on RTX 30 series hardware for Linux testing, but at least there's a pretty good rhythm for how the NVIDIA Linux support will play out. 15 September 08:42 PM EDT - NVIDIA - RTX 30 Series

Red Hat Has Been Working On New NVFS File-System Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer. 15 September 02:55 PM EDT - Linux Storage - Persistent Memory

Unvanquished Game, Assets Are Now Fully Open-Source Compliant Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses. 15 September 12:40 PM EDT - Linux Gaming - Fully Free Unvanquished

IBM Contributing A2O Processor Core To OpenPOWER Community IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community. 15 September 11:04 AM EDT - Hardware - OpenPOWER A2O

Vulkan Present Timing Extension With Aim To Avoid Stuttering The Vulkan System Integration working group has decided to publish their work-in-progress extension on VK_EXT_present_timing as their effort to expose the presentation engine's display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time. 15 September 10:46 AM EDT - Vulkan - VK_EXT_present_timing

Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.4944 Brings Many Minor Optimizations The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Linux OpenCL/Level-Zero compute stack as well as now being used by their Windows graphics driver and potentially their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in the future is out with a new release. 15 September 09:48 AM EDT - Intel - IGC 1.0.4944

Lightworks Software Now Independent Of EditShare For just over a decade the Lightworks high-end, cross-platform video editing software has been owned by EditShare after it was acquired from Gee Broadcast. Now though LWKS Software Ltd has been established and acquired this video editing software from EditShare. 15 September 06:57 AM EDT - Multimedia - LWKS Software

Intel Graphics Driver Patches Revived For Per-Client Engine Activity One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU's render/blitter/video engines were being utilized. 15 September 06:36 AM EDT - Intel - Interesting Possibilities

Fedora 34 Change To Further Compress Install Media Rejected Due To Install Time Concerns The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting. 15 September 12:05 AM EDT - Fedora - SquashFS Settings

14 September

Linux 5.9 Dropping Soft Scrollback Support From FB + VGA Console Code Linus Torvalds has decided to do away with the "soft scrollback" functionality found in the FBCON and VGACON kernel code as a sign of the times. 14 September 08:46 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - Software Scrollback

AMD Shows First Glimpse Of Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics Card Ahead of the RDNA 2 / Navi 2 reveal on October 28, AMD has shown off the first official render of a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card. 14 September 05:44 PM EDT - Radeon - Radeon RX 6000

"Microsoft Wants To Create A Complete Virtualization Stack With Linux" Microsoft engineers are sending out new kernel patches in looking to expand the Linux support around the Microsoft Hypervisor (Hyper-V). 14 September 03:28 PM EDT - Microsoft - New Patches

Radeon GPU Profiler 1.8 Released With Redesigned Developer Panel AMD today released a new version of their Radeon GPU Profiler utility for Linux and Windows systems for profiling games/applications on Radeon graphics hardware under both Linux and Windows. 14 September 01:41 PM EDT - Radeon - Radeon GPU Profiler 1.8

Mesa 20.3 + Linux 5.9 Is In Great Shape Against AMDVLK, AMDGPU-PRO The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with its ACO back-end by default is now winning nearly across the board against not only AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver with LLVM back-end but also AMDGPU-PRO with the proprietary shader compiler back-end. 14 September 10:48 AM EDT - Display Drivers

Linux 5.10 To Bring Some Improvements For Newer Lenovo Laptops With Lenovo working to expand their Linux line-up and already Fedora being offered on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, more Linux support improvements are on the way. 14 September 07:09 AM EDT - Hardware - X1 Carbon Gen8

AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 Vulkan Driver Released With Several Game Fixes AMD has kicked off the new week with the release of AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems derived in part from the same sources as their Windows Vulkan driver. 14 September 06:45 AM EDT - Radeon - AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5

FuryBSD 2020-Q3 Released For This Xfce/KDE FreeBSD Desktop Distribution FuryBSD 2020-Q3 is out as the newest quarterly feature release to this BSD distribution built atop FreeBSD and focused on providing a pleasant desktop experience and one that can function as a LiveDVD for trying out the desktop BSD without installation. 14 September 06:27 AM EDT - BSD - FuryBSD 2020-Q3

Qbs 1.17 Released With This Build System Still Alive Back in late 2018 there was the decision by The Qt Company to deprecate Qbs in favor of CMake. The Qbs build system hasn't been actively worked on by The Qt Company in one year but some community members have been still hacking on it leading to today's Qbs 1.17 release. 14 September 06:09 AM EDT - Qt - Qbs 1.17

13 September

Linux 5.9-rc5 Looks Fairly Normal Aside From Wildfires + Performance Regression Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.9-rc5 this evening as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel gearing up for a stable release in October. 13 September 08:31 PM EDT - Linux Kernel - Linux 5.9-rc5

NVIDIA Announces $40 Billion Deal To Acquire Arm The recent rumors panned out and NVIDIA just announced they have reached a definitive deal with SoftBank to acquire Arm. 13 September 07:53 PM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA + Arm

The Latest On The Linux 5.9 Kernel Regression Stemming From Page Lock Fairness Last week we reported on a Linux 5.9 kernel regression following benchmarks from Linux 5.0 to 5.9 and there being a sharp drop with the latest development kernel. That kernel regression was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds at the start of the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem and one still being analyzed in coming up with a proper solution. So the short story is it's a work-in-progress while this article has some additional insight and benchmarks done over the course of the past few days. 13 September 04:25 PM EDT - Software

Mark Shuttleworth Now Plans To Restore Ubuntu's Community Council Back on Friday there was Mark Shuttleworth's comments following some friction within the Ubuntu community and uncertainty over roles. After thinking about it over the weekend, he has decided to go ahead and work to reinstate the Ubuntu Community Council. 13 September 03:07 PM EDT - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Community Council

Habana Labs' Gaudi NIC Support Being Worked On For Linux Kernel Intel-owned AI startup Habana Labs is working on expanding their "Gaudi" support to now include the NIC network interface found on this AI training accelerator hardware. 13 September 09:41 AM EDT - Intel - Gaudi NIC

Xfce 4.16pre1 Released As The First Step Towards This Next Desktop Update Following the very delayed Xfce 4.14, the Xfce 4.16 release is progressing with plans for releasing this year. Xfce 4.16pre1 was released at the end of August while it was the release announcement that was delayed for this lightweight desktop environment update. 13 September 03:15 AM EDT - Desktop - Xfce 4.16