The Syscall User Dispatch support looks like it should be mainlined for the Linux 5.11 kernel. This functionality is important for modern Windows games running on Linux under Wine / Proton.

Syscall User Dispatch has been in the works for a while as a kernel-level improvement for dealing with Windows games/apps that use system call instructions, bypassing the Windows API . Games avoiding the Windows API and performing system calls directly is an increasingly common occurrence by modern Windows games, seemingly in the name of Digital Rights Management schemes

DXVK 1.7.3 is out as the latest stable update to this project implementing the Direct3D APIs atop Vulkan for accelerating the Linux gaming experience.

DXVK 1.7.3 adds support for new DXGI interfaces recently exposed on Windows 10, an option for scaling the DXVK heads-up display on HiDPI displays, various fixes, and several optimizations. EverQuest 2 and Trine 4 also saw some targeted fixes.

Added support for new DXGI interfaces introduced in Windows 10 version 1809.
Added

While Intel engineers over the course of the year began upstreaming various elements of the Keem Bay SoC support, the actual Vision Processing Unit (VPU) enabling hasn't been sent out for review until now. Intel has sent out their initial patches for bringing up the Vision Processing Unit on the open-source Linux kernel.

Intel's Visual Processing Unit that is new to the Keem Bay SoC can be used as a standalone SoC or as a PCI Express vision processing accelerator The Linux kernel work is ultimately about fulfilling both

Bcachefs was sent out for another round of review at the end of October. While it doesn't look like this file-system born out of Linux's block cache code will be mainlined in the immediate near future, it's still on a nice trajectory.

The October post to the Linux kernel mailing list outlined all of the current features and those recently completed like erasure coding, inline data extents, and more -- plus many bug fixes.

Since that posting, Bcachefs has been focusing on performance optimizations

Outreachy interns have been announced for the winter 2020 round. Selected participants are working on various open-source tasks from December through March in exchange for a $5,500 USD stipend to become involved with open-source.

This alternative to the likes of Google Summer of Code has several interesting projects underway this round. Some of these December 2020 to March 2021 projects include:

- Under the Mozilla umbrella, adding Linux touchpad support for desktop zooming.

- Improving the

Valve has just updated their Steam Survey results for November, showing how the Linux gaming marketshare continues to evolve during this pandemic-driven year.

From August to October it was 0.89% to 0.94% to 0.90% ... Generally keeping with the 0.8~0.9% average we have been seeing for quite the long while since the advent of Steam Play (Proton + DXVK) pushed up the percentages from the prior all-time lows.

Now with

Last month the Microsoft-backed Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver was merged into Mesa 21.0. This is the driver for allowing graphics/compute APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL to run on top of Direct3D with Windows 10. That work to the Gallium D3D12 code has been continuing with the start of the cross-platform code now being merged.

Before getting too excited, while this is about cross-platform support for this Gallium Direct3D 12 code

Following Tuesday's disclosure of more X.Org Server security bugs , X.Org Server 1.20.10 was released that provides those input fixes plus a number of other patches that have been back-ported and accumulated in the 1.20 series.

With no sign of X.Org Server 1.21 coming, the point releases of the 1.20 series continue with some interesting back-ports. Besides the security fixes, this round includes:

- Bumping the max number

NVIDIA is working on allowing their proprietary driver to support passing buffers as DMA-BUF. In turn this should allow for better supporting their proprietary driver on Wayland compared to the EGLStreams mess.

A Phoronix reader tipped us off to NVIDIA developer comments last month in response to a KDE EGLStreams bug. A bug report was opened regarding that restarting the compositing breaks the EGLStreams back-end for KDE's KWin.

NVIDIA developer Erik Kurzinger acknowledged that their EGL Wayland code isn't setup to handle compositor restarting. So at least