Over the past year we have seen various Vulkan features landing in the FFmpeg repository and this past week brought more fixes and improvements around using the Vulkan API for accelerated filters and more.

Landing in FFmpeg this week were the first batch of Vulkan improvements since the prior big push in May. There are various fixes, changes to allow custom Vulkan device contexts, possible segmentation fault fixes, optionally enabling more Vulkan extensions for usage, supporting more pixel formats, improving the download/upload paths, and other work. Recent Vulkan changes

Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source "AI Engine" driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree.

Sent out on Saturday were more patches around the Xilinx Alveo accelerator and the Xilinx Runtime (XRT) open-source stack.

Another

While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available.

It's looking like dav1d 0.

The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live.

Should you be wanting to use a Guitar Hero Live device connected to your Linux system by means of a PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii U wireless dongle, that support will work early next year with Linux 5.11.

Support has been queued into the hid-next code ahead of December's Linux 5.11 merge window. The PS3

The Mediatek MT8167 SoC was announced four years ago already while for the Linux 5.11 kernel in early 2021 will finally be display support via the open-source Mediatek DRM driver.

The Mediatek MT8167 SoC is used by several different Android tablets in recent years. Among the users of the SoC are the Acer Iconia One, Winnovo Tablet 8, Lenovo ZA400027US, and others. This SoC has two Cortex-A72

For aspiring DJs wanting to mix beats under Linux, the Pioneer DJ DDJ-RR controller should be working come Linux 5.11 early next year.

The Pioneer DDJ-RR is quite a capable ~$699 USD DJ controller that offers the mixing potential of many higher-end Pioneer DDJ devices but at a lower price point and geared for introductory DJs. The DDJ-RR is a two-channel controller and offers all of the common dedicated controls most DJs would make use of while offering high quality

Mike Blumenkrantz who has spent most of the year working on the "Zink" Gallium3D code for allowing universal OpenGL over Vulkan translation and took this Mesa code to OpenGL 4.6 compatibility and in some cases 90%+ the performance of a native OpenGL driver is now working on Zink development from a Radeon Navi graphics card with the RADV driver, which may in turn help uncover bugs and areas of optimizations for the open-source Radeon driver stack.

Blumenkrantz, who is now being funded by Valve as another

An exciting addition for GNOME 40 is that the Mutter compositor will be punting the input work off to a separate CPU thread.

The long in development effort by Red Hat's Carlos Garnacho for restructuring Mutter so that the input work can be handled in a separate CPU thread has finally reached the state where on Friday it was merged into Git.

This merge request has been open for the past three months but merged on Friday to handle input on a separate thread.

By moving the input work to a separate thread should