Kodi 19.0 "Matrix" is now available for this popular open-source, cross-platform HTPC solution.

Kodi 19.0 is represented by nearly five thousand commits since Kodi 18 and represents some big changes like finishing off the migration from Python 2 to Python 3. Kodi 19.0 also has many audio/video playback related improvements, AV1 software decoding is now supported, integer scaling is supported for those playing game emulators within Kodi, various theme/skin improvements, metadata scraper

In addition to having DXVK 1.8 released for Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan, Valve's VKD3D-Proton project also is enjoying a new release in time for weekend gamers wanting to run the latest Direct3D 12 titles via Vulkan on Linux with Steam Play.

VKD3D-Proton 2.2 is the new release today and is mostly on bug/regression fixes but also "unblocks significant future feature development" moving forward.

VKD3D-Proton

Linux 5.12 with queued thermal changes will avoid prematurely shutting down mobile Intel workstations when a "critical" thermal threshold is reached that isn't too critical.

Sent in on Friday were the thermal patches for the Linux 5.12 merge window. Catching my attention within that assortment of patches were two patches by Canonical's Kai-Heng Feng who is part of the Linux kernel team for Ubuntu.

The patches to Intel's int340x and Intel PCH drivers are for fixing an

It looks like the open-source driver support to the next-generation CDNA GPU / MI100 "Arcturus" successor is on the way. Hitting mainline AMDGPU LLVM is a new "GFX90A" target adding new interesting features for compute.

The AMD GFX90A target is a big addition and was quickly and quietly merged this week... So much so that it generated some concerns and criticism in the review from other upstream LLVM developers that the merge request was just for a short

Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published.

With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode. The patches remain out-of-tree for now and it's not clear if/when it will be ready for mainline. There also is a

The DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates were sent in today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window. Two of the biggest features are VRR/Adaptive-Sync now being supported for Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics while on the AMD side there is initial "OverDrive" overclocking support for their newest RDNA 2 GPUs.

We have covered many of the individual kernel graphics driver improvements in recent weeks of this new material for Linux 5.12 while the summary of most interesting work includes:

- Radeon

As expected, the new port of the Linux kernel to the Nintendo 64 game console from the 90's is now being mainlined in 2021 with the Linux 5.12 kernel...

The MIPS feature pull request was sent in today and it includes the port to the Nintendo 64. This is the Linux port to the N64 announced back on Christmas . The Nintendo 64 is powered by a MIPS64 NEC VR4300 at 93.7

Now that Mesa 21.1 has OpenGL 4.6 support for Zink , the attention is turning to fixes for the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite and juicing as much performance as possible out of this OpenGL on Vulkan driver layer within Mesa.

Most active Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz, working under contract for Valve, has been working on the CTS fixes and performance improvements now that mainline Mesa has the Zink GL 4.6 support. Besides OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.1 is also now possible with Zink.