AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 is out this morning as the first update of the year for the open-source official AMD Vulkan Linux driver and it's an exciting update.

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 brings the recently reported on Vulkan layer that makes it very easy to switch between AMDVLK and RADV drivers . With the new driver installed and the Vulkan layer activated, setting the AMD_VULKAN_ICD=RADV environment variable instead will cause RADV to be used.

Switching

A Linux fix is on the way for a new quirk to address an issue whereby some AMD Radeon graphics cards have an issue with the resizable BAR (AMD Smart Access Memory) handling that could lead to lower performance.

The quirk is about allowing BAR0 resizing to be done even for PCI Express graphics cards that don't advertise Resizable BAR support for a size large enough to span the entire video memory size but at least larger than the default.

Initially set as a quirk for this handling is the Sapphire Radeon RX

Proton Experimental 5.13-20210107 is out today as the first 2021 release of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

This is just an experimental update in the Proton 5.13 series for testing, but given that the current Proton 5.13-4 release is one month old and Wine 6.0 will be released soon, hopefully there will be the next stable update shortly for bettering the Windows gaming on

While Intel is generally well regarded for their Linux development practices especially as it pertains to continuous integration and their test labs for vetting code prior to reaching the mainline Linux kernel to minimize the risk of regressions or other unintended side effects, those running older Haswell GT1 low-end graphics have seen the past several kernel versions going back a half-year yield a GPU hang at boot.

This bug report has been the central focus for initially tracking the issue and then more recently the testing of patches. The problematic behavior is

Intel has released their High Performance Computing Reference Stack 2.0 as the latest Docker image optimized for HPC/AI workloads.

Intel's High Performance Computing Reference Stack (HPCRS) 2.0 is built atop a CentOS base (yes, not their own high performance Clear Linux) and bundles PyTorch, various Intel oneAPI components, and more. HPCRS also incudes some proprietary components like the Intel Math Kernel Library.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on reverse-engineering Arm GPUs and in particular the multi-year effort so far working on the Panfrost open-source driver stack has taken up an interest in Apple's M1 graphics processor.

Over the past few weeks Alyssa began exploring the M1 GPU with a new Apple Mac Mini. The ultimate goal she hopes is to create a Mesa driver for the M1 GPU, which will be critical if the Linux efforts to get the new SoC/devices working outside

The GNOME Shell user experience improvements and other components continue in development at full-speed for the GNOME 40 release due out in March.

Following word last month of some significant changes to the GNOME Shell UX , GNOME's Allan Day has published a new blog post outlining some of their progress on these changes as well as a fresh video of the current stage.

Allan noted, " There are still work items remaining and the branch has noticeable polish issues. Anyone testing it should bear this in mind – as it

NVIDIA today released the 460.32.03 Linux graphics driver as their first stable release in the 460 driver series.

Back before the holidays NVIDIA published the 460.27.04 beta Linux driver with firmed up Vulkan ray-tracing support and many other changes. The NVIDIA 460.32.03 driver out today is the stable version of that prior beta driver.

Thus with today's NVIDIA 460.32.03