This week marked Intel sending out initial Linux driver enablement patches for Alder Lake P mobile support to complement the existing Alder Lake S desktop support that has been coming together in recent months. In addition to the Linux kernel code for ADL-P, the Intel open-source Media Driver code was also updated for video acceleration on this Intel hybrid chip.

Alder Lake P open-source media acceleration support was merged this week into the GitHub repository for this video encode/decode implementation. Worth noting from that code drop is Alder

In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games , this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games.

Lead Gallium Nine developer Axel Davy merged his code for optimizing dynamic system memory "SYSTEMMEM" buffers. Up to now Gallium Nine did not specifically handle the SYSTEMMEM CPU buffers while now it's better optimized for this type of buffers.

Axel explained of what triggered him

GRVK is the open-source project implementing AMD's Mantle API on Vulkan . Mantle was the precursor to the Vulkan industry standard and while it's no longer in use by AMD, there still are some games out there that allow making use of it.

GRVK allows for such Mantle games to run atop Vulkan not only for AMD drivers/GPUs but also with NVIDIA and Intel graphics too. The original Vulkan API is derived from and built off Mantle so GRVK is able to map rather nicely and has been making

Now that Clang LTO support was merged into Linux 5.12 for x86_64 and ARM64, Google engineers have sent out their patches enabling Clang Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) support for the Linux kernel.

Clang's CFI support depended upon the link-time optimization (LTO) support first landing in the kernel. Now that LTO is in place, Sami Tolvanen and the other Google engineers sent out their kernel patches for bringing up the CFI security feature.

Clang's Control

Google engineer Yu Zhao sent out patches proposing a "multigenerational LRU" implementation for the Linux kernel's least recently used (LRU) handling for memory page replacement.

The engineers working on multi-generational LRU found the Linux kernel's current page reclaim code to be too expensive for CPU usage and making poor choices over what to evict. But with this new LRU implementation it's more "performant, versatile, and straightforward" with promising results.

Those interested in all of the technical details on this multigenerational LRU

If all goes well FreeBSD 13.0 will be officially released before the end of the month while out this weekend is the second release candidate for testing.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC2 ships the latest fixes in preparing for this big FreeBSD operating system update.

With FreeBSD 13.0-RC2 the growfs utility can now work on read/write file-systems for growing their size, fixes to the WireGuard interface (if_wg), ZFS file-system fixes, TCP network fixes

Per reader requests, several software-defined radio (SDR) benchmarks have been added alongside the 640+ other distinct workloads available for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org .

For those interested in evaluating CPUs for software-defined radio or signal processing purposes, some of the latest test additions may be of interest to you. GNU Radio , LuaRadio , srsLTE , and Liquid DSP are now all available for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org.

Via those OB links are already a

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution.

It was another busy week improving KDE by all the developers involved both with fixes to KDE Plasma 5.21 and related applications as well as looking ahead with feature work to Plasma 5.22 and the next round of app releases.

KDE developer Nate Graham has once again put out his nicely summarized overview of KDE changes that landed for the week. In going through those changes, some of this week'

GRUB 2.06 was originally anticipated for release in 2020 but then the BootHole security vulnerability foiled those plans. This long awaited bootloader update though is near with GRUB 2.06-RC1 being issued on Friday and plans to formally release it in about one month's time.

GRUB 2.06-RC1 was released on Friday by prominent GRUB developer Daniel Kiper of Oracle. This follows GRUB seeing increased cooperation among developers and distributions especially following the BootHole vulnerability. This will mark