Today marks five years since AMD began the GPUOpen initiative for providing more open-source Radeon GPU code projects, code samples, and more for better engaging GPU/game developers in the open.

As any longtime Phoronix reader will know, AMD's open-source Linux driver initiative is going on for more than a decade while the celebration today is just over their GPUOpen initiative turning five years old. The three principles that continue to guide GPUOpen are providing code and documentation to PC developers to exert more control on the GPU

Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.

Following those unfortunate layoffs last summer, they exposed all of the Mozilla Developer Network documentation to GitHub. Now they are announcing the Open Web Docs organization.

" Open Web Docs (

Those working on VKD3D-Proton as the Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API are beginning to work on DirectX Ray-Tracing support but it isn't yet ready for gamers.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen has opened the initial pull request for enabling ray-tracing extensions with VKD3D-Proton.

He noted in the PR , " Don't expose any features to app yet, but allow overriding [feature level] to 12.2 for local testing while bringing up DXR.

It looks like the open-source Intel kernel driver enablement work for the "Alder Lake S" processors coming to market late in the year will soon have the support mainlined in the kernel.

Over the past few months we've seen various Alder Lake S enablement patches materialize for the graphics driver support as well as elsewhere in the platform coverage. The Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver has seen various rounds of "ADL-S" patches for review but it looks like they are now tidied up

The Apache Software Foundation that oversees 340+ Apache projects saw a measurable rise in security related issues during the course of 2020.

In publishing their 2020 security report, the Apache Software Foundation found that during the past calendar year the number of security email threads they were involved with was up 53% compared to 2019, the number of security vulnerabilities up 13% compared to the year prior, and the number of assigned CVEs was up 24%.

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Today's Vulkan 1.2.168 specification update brings the usual specification corrections/clarifications while also introducing two new KHR extensions.

The new extensions of Vulkan 1.2.168 include:

VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout - An extension worked on by Intel, NVIDIA, and Broadcom engineers. This extension allows shaders to explicitly define the workgroup storage class memory and to create aliases between variables from that storage class in a compute shader. This explicit layout extension is important

Last week marked the last Q/A session for the UBports' Ubuntu Touch team working to advance the Linux smartphone platform where they laid out some of their upcoming objectives.

From the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 92 session various interesting bits of information were shared as far as their plans over the coming months for this community that continues to advance the Ubuntu Touch effort primarily for smartphones -- various Android devices and also the likes of the PinePhone.

Lomiri (the rebranded Unity 8 effort) on the desktop is slowly making

Last quarter Intel began upstreaming their open-source Alder Lake S graphics support for Linux. It hasn't been too big of a feat or revealed many details since it's still Gen12 / Xe graphics seen since Tiger Lake. But it's been coming along and over the past month is now wired up into Intel's open-source Media Driver stack too.

Merged back on Christmas was the initial decode patch for Alder lake S (ADL_S) that was just a few hundred lines