It's been proposed in the past but never acted upon yet but the idea of dropping/retiring Mesa's "classic" OpenGL drivers from the mainline code-base and letting them potentially live on in an "LTS" branch has once again been brought up.

Mesa developer Dylan Baker has brought up the idea of removing the classic drivers from Mesa master following next quarter's 21.1 release. The Mesa 21.1 branch would then be forked after Mesa 21.1 is EOL

With some Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards sporting a USB-C interface for USB-C monitors or VR headsets, AMD has been working on the open-source Linux driver support for this interface.

Similar to NVIDIA cards supporting "VirtualLink" and the USB Type-C driver they worked on as a result (though NVIDIA dropped this interface for Ampere GPUs), AMD is working through the same path now in their Linux driver support.

The USB Type-C controller found on the latest AMD Navi

In addition to the last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" tuning in GCC 11 , also landing rather late are scheduling updates for the GNU Compiler Collection around the IBM POWER10 processor target.

Initial POWER10 support for the GCC compiler has been brewing for two years now. Even prior to IBM formally announcing POWER10, the enablement work started out in 2019 as the "future" POWER processor target and POWERXX . Since then that work on ensuring good POWER10 ISA support

Announced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt FPGA Soft CPU Core. OpenPOWER's Microwatt is a VHDL-based design for an open-source POWER ISA processor. core. The Microwatt is a basic 64-bit POWER core that can be run for software simulations or on FPGA hardware. But now Microwatt will actually see chip fabrication thanks to a program sponsored by Google.

The VHDL 2008 soft core of Microwatt remains available via GitHub while now it will actually be fabbed thanks to the

Of the many possible areas for advancing Linux and open-source, the latest project being embraced by the Linux Foundation is Liquid Prep for helping farmers water their crops. It's a noble cause but not too Linux centered unless talking about cloud resources.

Liquid Prep is the newest project to be hosted by the Linux Foundation after being started by various IBM engineers during an employee coding challenge. Liquid Prep ties into a hardware water sensor located on a farm/garden for measuring the moisture level of the soil. From there

One week ago AMD introduced the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors while this morning Intel has made public when they will be formally introducing their 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

On 6 April is when Intel will be publicly launching their 3rd Gen "Ice Lake" Xeon Scalable processors. Intel just relayed this brief media alert:

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 22, 2021 – Join Intel's Navin Shenoy, executive vice president in the Data Platforms Group, and Lisa

Following last week's release of the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and Radeon Software for Linux 20.50 , the new "Navy Flounder" microcode required for this GPU to function with the open-source AMDGPU Linux driver stack has been published.

Merged a few minutes ago into linux-firmware.git as the de facto repository for all the firmware/microcode binary blobs for Linux systems was that Navy Flounder firmware as well as updated binaries pulled from the 20.50

It's looking like the Linux 5.13 kernel will better support some Thrustmaster wheels due to new driver code providing for proper USB device initialization.

Linux has already supported some Thrustmaster racing wheels while special handling is now being added for others like the Thrustmaster FFB Wheel T150RS, T300RS, T300 Ferrari Alcantara Edition, T500RS).

As part of the HID Git repository is now a for-5.13/thrustmaster branch where improvements

Vulkan 1.2.173 is out this morning as the latest revision to this high performance graphics/compute API.

Vulkan 1.2.173 does come with a number of bug fixes for issues brought up by the community as well as internally. Most notable though are two new extensions introduced for Google's Fuchsia platform.

VK_FUCHSIA_external_memory is one of those new extensions from Google and is for exporting/importing device memory handles on Fuchsia. This is similar to the