While the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source OpenGL driver for Linux systems is very well received and generally outperforming the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver on Linux/Windows and performing very strong against NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL driver too, it's not game over for this older graphics API and AMD is still working to lower the CPU overhead even further for this open-source code.

RadeonSI Gallium3D allows for maximizing the OpenGL performance out of Radeon graphics cards under Linux. There has even been various remarks about the prospects

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available.

GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME'

AMD today released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q1 driver packages for Windows and Linux systems.

The Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise is AMD's driver package updated quarterly that is focused on their Radeon Pro products and older FirePro professional graphics while being derived from the same driver sources as their consumer Radeon Software drivers just with added QA and focus on enterprise use-cases. In the case of Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise for Linux, still offering both AMDGPU-Open and AMDGPU-PRO components.

On

Raised during the recent discussion over looking at removing Mesa's classic drivers from the mainline tree this year is that there still exists an effort trying to create an Intel Gallium3D driver for older pre-Broadwell graphics currently only served by the i965 classic driver. That Crocus effort continues to be worked on but isn't yet mainline.

Crocus is the in-development Gallium3D driver focused on Intel Gen4 (i965 chipset) graphics through Gen7/Gen7.5

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder.

The 3.0 release delivers on compression efficiency improvements, speed improvements for the real-time mode, new APIs, scaling optimizations, multi-threading performance boosts under the real-time mode, and other improvements. There are also a number of bug fixes.

This libaom 3.0 release was formerly developed as version 2.1 prior to the version bump after 2.1-rc1.

While Microsoft often likes to proclaim their "love" for Linux, it's been independent open-source developer Maximilian Luz that has been spearheading improvements for Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. With Linux 5.13 his latest work on better handling Microsoft Surface device detachment handling should land.

Queued into the x86 platform driver area's for-next code is this Microsoft Surface DTX driver written by Luz.

The Microsoft Surface DTX driver is basically for better handling the detachment process from the "clipboard" system

Right now when it comes to Motorola 68000 "m68k" emulation with Linux the most powerful target is the Quadra 800 that is limited to just 1GB of RAM and specific interfaces. But on the way is the new "Virtual M68k Machine" that is much more powerful.

The Macintosh Quadra 800 is from 1993 with its Motorola 68040 running at 33MHz with 8MB of RAM. Linux and QEMU has

ROCm 4.0 released back in December with "CDNA" GPU support while now ROCm 4.1 has been released as the newest quarterly feature release to this open-source Radeon compute stack focused primarily on HPC/data-center needs.

ROCm 4.1 delivers on several new features but before anyone asks, no, there still is not any GFX10/RDNA GPU support for either the Radeon RX 5000 or RX 6000 series. The ROCm compute support remains focused on Vega

Nokia Bell Labs announced today that the copyright to the Plan 9 operating system software has been transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development of this novel distributed operating system that originated in the 80's.

In addition to the Bell Labs Plan 9 software copyright being transferred to the Plan 9 Foundation, the code to Plan 9 Editions 1/2/3/4 are now released under an MIT license by the foundation. Previously the Plan 9 code released by Lucent Technologies was under the Lucent Public License or