Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.

Gallium3D threaded context support is now wired up for Zink including async buffer mapping/replacement, async queue submission, and the async Gallium3D flush handing.

Gallium3D threaded context support has already shown to be a sizable win for

With the start of the new month comes updated Steam Survey figures for the month prior.

This is another month where the numbers seem a bit flakey... Originally for February 2021 the Steam on Linux marketshare came in at about 0.81% . That 0.81% threshold was seen originally at the start of March and recently when checking back on the Steam Survey. However, as has happened many times before, the revision for March isn't adding up for whatever reasons this

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month.

Ubuntu 21.04 is to be powered by the Linux 5.11 stable kernel, is sticking to the GNOME 3.38 desktop as its default environment, Mesa 21.0 is in place providing the newest open-source graphics drivers, GCC 10 is the default code compiler, LTO is being enabled , standalone XWayland is available , better Wayland

To kick off a new month of Linux gaming, Valve today released Proton 6.3-1 as the latest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

Proton 6.3-1 is significant in that it has re-based against Wine 6.3 compared to the prior Wine/Proton 5.13 series. Besides re-basing against the newer Wine upstream, there are many changes too.

First up, a number of additional games -- including many high

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan EXT_conservative_rasterization extension that is most notably used by DXVK for translating Direct3D atop this graphics API and work is also pending too for VKD3D.

The conservative rasterization extension was introduced back in Vulkan 1.0.67 from early 2018. The conservative rasterization mode allows for over or under estimation for limiting the rasterization process and ensuring certainty over the rendering behavior.

DXVK optionally allows using the extension as

Intel's open-source developers have released a new version of IGC, the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their open-source Linux compute stack, recently was transitioned for use by their Windows driver too, and might eventually be piped into their Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers .

We haven't heard anything or seen any new code over the past quarter for integrating IGC into Mesa, so it's not clear where those plans stand at the moment. But in any case this open-source graphics compiler

In the past few weeks since the introduction of the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors there has finally been AMD Zen 3 " Znver3 " tuning work that's been hurried into the GCC 11 compiler code-base ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks. That initial Zen 3 tuning work has also now been back-ported to the GCC 10 branch ahead of its next point release.

The past few weeks have seen several commits to GCC Git by SUSE's Jan Hubicka for

The past several weeks have seen a few rounds of Intel graphics driver changes sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 cycle. This Linux 5.13 Intel graphics driver work has included Alder Lake S enablement and other feature changes. A final batch of "feature" work was sent out this morning for targeting the Intel kernel graphics driver in Linux 5.13.

This final patch of Intel i915 kernel graphics driver changes for targeting Linux 5.13 is "

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to be out around the end of February but blocker bugs have resulted in additional release candidates as the developers work to button up this open-source compiler stack release.

LLVM release manager Tom Stellard overnight issued LLVM 12.0-rc4 as the latest unplanned release candidate for this compiler update. More fixes have landed and ideally this will be the last release candidate and what the official release should look like, assuming no more pressing issues turn up.

LLVM 12.0