Alexandros Frantzis has announced the creation of a Wayland driver for Wine. This driver allows Windows GDI/OpenGL applications to run on Wayland compositors without any use of X11/XWayland.

The code hasn't yet been merged into Wine and given the code freeze is too late to appear for next month's Wine 6.0 release, but the experimental branch is available today for those interested.

This Wayland driver is working for basic GDI/OpenGL applications and all core functionality but a number of items are missing

Timed with the expanded Vulkan ray-tracing resources available today, NVIDIA has released their first Linux driver beta in the R460 series as the eventual successor to the current 455.xx series.

The NVIDIA 460.27.04 Linux beta driver out this morning has full support for the Khronos-ratified ray-tracing extensions, support for the NVIDIA RTX A6000 series GPUs, support for Reverse PRIME Bypass as a new optimization for multi-GPU systems, other

Vulkan 1.2.162 was released at the end of November with the ratified Vulkan ray-tracing extension for multi-vendor use. The Khronos Group today is announcing the updated Vulkan SDK, tooling, code samples, and developer guide today with ray-tracing coverage included.

The Vulkan SDK has now been updated against Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extension supported and likewise the Vulkan Guide and other assets updated as well to cover the new VK_KHR_acceleration_

For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations.

While WebRender has been slowly appearing by default on other platforms, with Firefox 84 there is Mozilla finally flipping it on for some Linux systems. WebRender by default is initially appearing on if running Firefox from the GNOME desktop and doing so off an X11

While a "core/entry" pull request may not seem that exciting, this time around for the Linux 5.11 kernel there are two prominent additions.

The two big additions with the core/entry pull request submitted on Monday for Linux 5.11 are:

- TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL that replaces the existing and inefficient signal delivery mode of task work. What makes this notable is delivering a huge performance boost to IO_uring , the modern I/O interface for the Linux kernel that has

AMD has released the newest open-source snapshot of their official AMD Vulkan "AMDVLK" driver for Linux systems.

AMDVLK 2020.Q4.6 is the new release out today. This open-source Vulkan driver rebuilds against the Vulkan 1.2.162 API, offers performance tuning for Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Navi 21, and has two new extensions. The new extensions are VK_EXT_shader_terminate_invocation and VK_KHR_fragment_shading_

HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel.

There are several prominent additions to the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.11 including:

- The AMD SB-TSI sensor driver has been mainlined as a sideband temperature sensor interface for AMD EPYC server platforms. AMD SB-TSI should ultimately prove useful for cases like OpenBMC deployments.

- AMD Zen 3 support for the AMD_Energy driver . Sadly the current "amd_energy" Linux driver

The latest Vulkan extension now supported by Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is support for the new VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate.

VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate is an interesting extension and sure to be of interest for game developers. The extension allows changing the rate dynamically at which fragments are shaded. The fragment shading rate can be tuned on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This extension can help in allowing games to provide higher

The Linux kernel this year has seen new safeguards and efforts aiming to have user-space reduce their arbitrary poking of CPU machine specific registers (MSRs) in the name of security and other handling concerns. That effort has continued on with the Linux 5.11 cycle.

Linux user-space software with administrative privileges can write to arbitrary CPU MSRs and that can cause problems for a host of reasons. Recent kernels have added the support for adding notifications when an unrecognized MSR write from user-space occurs along with an