KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop.

Merged to KWin as an excellent start to 2021 is a rework of the compositing scheduling. Vlad Zahorodnii overhauled the code that should lead to latency reductions for all compositing operations, a user toggle whether low-latency or smooth animations are preferred, support for mixed refresh rate displays on Wayland, and more. The big rework was merged and will appear with Plasma 5.

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC6 release is an updated Wine-Staging build.

Wine-Staging 6.0-RC6 continues carrying just shy of 800 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base. Given the current Wine focus on bug fixing until the stable Wine 6.0.0 debut in the next few weeks, this Wine-Staging update isn't too notable.

The lone new functionality introduced with Wine-Staging 6.0-RC6 though is to

With Linux 5.11 the Intel Linux graphics driver is bringing async page-flipping for Gen9/Skylake and newer . However, patches pending for a future release (potentially 5.12) would extend that performance benefiting feature now all the way back to the Ironlake days.

Async page flipping allows avoiding an extra blit per frame for full-screen games/applications. This can provide obvious performance benefits and has been a long time coming for the Intel Linux graphics driver. While the initial implementation in Linux

The first of several batches of feature updates to the AMDGPU kernel driver were sent in on Friday for anticipation of the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window that should be opening up in February while the stable Linux 5.12 debut will happen likely by/around May. With this initial pull does come some new features and improvements around the recent AMD graphics processor support additions.

Likely of most interest to users out of this initial set of AMDGPU driver changes queuing in DRM-Next is the OverDrive overclocking for the

Wine 6.0-rc6 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate of Wine 6.0 that will be released in the near future. Either due to nearing the end of the release cycle and/or Wine developers having a post-holiday hangover, Wine 6.0-RC6 is coming in light on new fixes.

This sixth test version of Wine 6.0 has just ten known bug fixes. It may be a culmination of factors why this week is light but in any case the

As noted before the holidays that Mozilla Firefox was ready to enable AVIF image decoding by default , now that the holidays have passed and developers back to their keyboards, Firefox today has re-enabled AVIF by default.

Since Google's Chrome 85 there has been AVIF support enabled by default while the Firefox support has been disabled by default for now. But as of today in their nightly code the functionality is there out-of-the-box.

The change landed just a few minutes ago for AVIF by default

Another NVIDIA engineer has made his first contribution to Mesa in the rather interesting focus of fixing up Volta so atomic operations will work with OpenCL SVM.

NVIDIA contributions to Mesa are rare... During 2020 were just two commits from a NVIDIA.com address from one developer, no commits from NVIDIA.com addresses in 2019, and a number in 2018 all in regards to Tegra embedded graphics support. In the prior five years there have been just six NVIDIA engineers with commits

Coming out in early 2020 were patches by an Amazon engineer to implement flushing the L1 data cache on context switching in the name of security given the various data sampling vulnerabilities. That work so far has been rejected from the mainline kernel but today was updated and makes it harder to enable and thus moving forward could stand chances to finally see the opt-in functionality merged to mainline.

This opt-in L1d flushing on context switching tried for the Linux 5.8 kernel but at the time