The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has now enabled displayable DCC (Delta Color Compression) support that should yield some performance benefit while there still is more work to be completed.

Google engineer and RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has merged the displayable DCC support into this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Delta Color Compression can help with video memory bandwidth savings for both dGPUs and APUs by basically storing pixel differences within a block as a delta relative to one pixel at full precision per block, which often

The HID subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.

Most significant to the HID updates in this kernel is the introduction of the Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller driver . Sony published this driver back at the end of last year and is fully open-source and supporting USB and Bluetooth modes of operation and all key features from LEDs and motion sensors to battery reporting, rumble, light bar control, and more. Sony is expected to expand the hardware support handled by this driver

GNOME 40 beta is coming together with the GNOME Shell and Mutter components having seen new releases on Monday.

The GNOME Shell 40 Beta brings its redesign to the overview area, out-of-date extensions are now disabled by default, and a wide variety of fixes ranging from crash fixes to general bug fixes.

The full list of GNOME Shell 40 Beta changes can be found via GNOME's Gitlab .

The Mutter 40 Beta changes are also interesting with it now defaulting to starting XWayland on-demand

Libinput 1.17 is out as the newest version of this Wayland/X.Org input handling library for the Linux desktop.

Libinput 1.17 brings improvements to the libinput record/replay tools, adds a new libinput analyze recording command to analyze recorded libinput events, and support for tap-and-drag with two and three fingers. This new tag-and-drag implementation should be more versatile and easier to engage.

Meanwhile for those using Wacom AES tablets, smoothing has been disabled as it turns

Released yesterday was dav1d 0.8.2 as a fairly significant update to this AV1 CPU-based decoder. For those wondering what this update means for performance, here are some initial benchmarks.

While being a point release, dav1d 0.8.2 as expected is delivering some nice uplift in performance compared to dav1d 0.8.1. Some benchmarks I've been carrying out are indeed showing some nice improvements in performance:



But most significant are the 10-

The first release candidate of systemd 248 is now available with a number of improvements ranging from a new "system extensions images" concept to the out-of-memory daemon (OOMD) being declared stable.

The systemd 248-RC1 highlights include:

- A new concept of "system extension images" as images that can extend the /usr/ or /opt/ hierarchies at run-time with additional files. The images can be read-only and its usr/opt hierarchies combined via

One of many interesting and original open-source projects to be started in 2020 was ZLUDA, an open-spurce drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel graphics . ZLUDA - developed independent of Intel and NVIDIA - is built atop Intel's oneAPI Level Zero interface (hence the name, ZLUDA) and allows for unmodified CUDA applications to run on Intel UHD/Xe Graphics hardware with near-native performance. Well, that's the goal at least but with the initial ZLUDA release were a number of

The changes within the remote direct memory access (RDMA) subsystem for Linux 5.12 are deemed "quite small" but there is one interesting addition courtesy of Intel.

Covered last year on Phoronix was the Intel-led work on DMA-BUF support for RDMA for supporting peer-to-peer transactions over PCI Express between RDMA-enabled NICs and other PCIe devices, such as graphics cards. That peer-to-peer support via DMA-BUF with a focus on GPU support is what's coming