AMDGPU TMZ + HDCP Should Allow Widevine DRM To Behave Nicely With AMD Linux Systems Coming together this year for the mainline Linux kernel was the AMDGPU Trusted Memory Zone (TMZ) capability for encrypted video memory support with Radeon GPUs. This topic was talked about at this week's XDC2020 conference. 55 Minutes Ago - Radeon - TMZ + HDCP

Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Seeing Some 50~100% FPS Gains After working on getting the Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan driver up to OpenGL 4.6 with still pending patches, former Samsung OSG engineer Mike Blumenkrantz has been making remarkable progress on the performance aspect as well. 5 Hours Ago - Mesa - Zink Gallium3D Performance

Intel Compute Runtime 20.37.17906 Brings Rocket Lake Support Intel's software team has released a new version of their Compute Runtime that provides OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero capabilities for their graphics hardware on Linux. 9 Hours Ago - Intel - OpenCL + Level Zero

KDE Plasma 5.21 Bringing Systemd Startup Support, Wayland Improvements KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries characterized this week as "the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week!" 10 Hours Ago - KDE - Exciting Week

NVIDIA C++ Standard Library Now Available Via GitHub Introduced last year as part of CUDA 10.2 was libcu++ as the CUDA C++ standard library, which works with not only NVIDIA CUDA enabled configurations but also CPUs. The libcu++ sources are now available via GitHub. 11 Hours Ago - NVIDIA - libcu++

Sculpt OS 20.08 Released With Redesigned GUI Stack Building off the recent Genode OS 20.08 operating system framework release is now Sculpt OS 20.08 as the open-source project's general purpose operating system attempt. 13 Hours Ago - Operating Systems - Sculpt OS 20.08

FreeBSD 12.2 BETA2 Brings TRIM For Bhyve's VirtIO-BLK, Intel ICE Added The second beta of the forthcoming FreeBSD 12.2 is now available with a fair number of prominent changes accumulating over the past week. 16 Hours Ago - BSD - FreeBSD 12.2

18 September

OpenZFS 2.0-RC2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes Nearly one month ago OpenZFS 2.0 saw its first release candidate while now it's been succeeded by another test candidate in time for some weekend exposure. 18 September 06:45 PM EDT - Linux Storage - OpenZFS 2.0

Intel Submits More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 5.10 Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday. 18 September 03:53 PM EDT - Intel - Linux 5.10 Intel Graphics

Libre-SOC Still Persevering To Be A Hybrid CPU/GPU That's 100% Open-Source The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding. 18 September 12:26 PM EDT - Hardware - Libre-SOC

X.Org Is Getting Their Cloud / Continuous Integration Costs Under Control You may recall from earlier this year that the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud costs were growing out of control primarily due to their continuous integration setup. They were seeking sponsorships to help out with these costs but ultimately they've attracted new sponsors while also better configuring/optimizing their CI configuration in order to get those costs back at more manageable levels. 18 September 09:33 AM EDT - X.Org - Expensive Cloud

Linux 5.10 To Support AMD SME Hardware-Enforced Cache Coherency Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). 18 September 07:18 AM EDT - AMD - AMD SME

New /dev/random Implementation Hits 35th Revision Going on for more than four years now has been creating a new /dev/random implementation and this Friday marks the 35th revision to this big set of patches that aim for better performance and security. 18 September 06:39 AM EDT - Linux Kernel - LRNG /dev/random

Etnaviv Gallium3D Adds On-Disk Shader Cache Support Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache. 18 September 06:24 AM EDT - Mesa - Etnaviv Shader Cache

Taiwins 0.2 Released As Modular Wayland Compositor That Supports Lua Scripting Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release. 18 September 12:02 AM EDT - Wayland - Taiwins 0.2

17 September

V3DV Developers Lay Out Plans For Upstreaming The Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Driver In Mesa Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa. 17 September 08:38 PM EDT - Mesa - Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan

Linux 5.9 To Allow Controlling Page Lock Unfairness In Addressing Performance Regression Following the Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarks on AMD EPYC and it showing the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel regressing in some workloads, bisecting that issue, and that bringing up the issue of the performance regression over page lock fairness a solution for Linux 5.9 has now landed. 17 September 04:14 PM EDT - Software

Cache Creator Tool Proposed For AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Google engineer Steven Perron has laid out their proposal for an XGL cache creator tool for AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK. 17 September 12:55 PM EDT - Radeon - XGL Cache Creator

KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop. 17 September 11:10 AM EDT - KDE - Plasma 5.20

NVIDIA 455.23.04 Linux Beta Released With GeForce RTX 3080/3090 Support NVIDIA has once again managed to provide launch-day Linux driver support for their next-generation graphics processors. Today the NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta driver is shipping for Linux support with the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards. 17 September 09:42 AM EDT - NVIDIA - NVIDIA 455.23.04

RADV's "ACO" Shader Backend Still Pursuing RadeonSI, Early Work On RDNA 2 Valve developer Timur Kristóf who has been spending the past year working on the AMD Compiler "ACO" back-end for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" as well as beginning to port this shader compiler back-end to RadeonSI Gallium3D. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end has made incredible progress over the past year -- enough so that it's been the default for Mesa's RADV driver. During XDC2020 Day 2, Timur provided an update on ACO. 17 September 09:09 AM EDT - Radeon - ACO TODO 2020

Intel Releases HAXM 7.6.5 Execution Manager Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs. 17 September 06:56 AM EDT - Intel - Intel HAXM

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. 17 September 02:30 AM EDT - 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. 17 September 12:55 AM EDT - 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. 17 September 12:00 AM EDT - 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