Valve's open-source developers responsible for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are working on a new Vulkan extension to help in their porting/layering effort of Direct3D on top of the Vulkan API.

Not yet merged into the Vulkan repository but a short-lived public pull request on Monday as a seemingly accidental PR then quickly closed is the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor extension. VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor aims to reduce the descriptor memory footprint and with its new mechanisms aims to make

Mesa 20.3 was branched this evening in marking the end of feature development for this Q4-2020 Mesa3D release that should debut as stable in December. This also means that Mesa 21.0 is now open for development.

Mesa 20.3 bring continued improvements to LLVMpipe's OpenGL 4 capabilities, various new Vulkan and OpenGL extensions to the Intel/Radeon drivers, the RADV ACO compiler back-end continues getting in much better shape, OpenCL Clover has been seeing

ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux.

The lucky motherboard seeing the first ASUS firmware update on LVFS is the P11C-C-4L workstation/server motherboard. The ASUS P11C-C-4L is an EATX motherboard for the Intel Xeon E platform.

Announced by Arm back in September was the Neoverse V1 "Zeus" platform with 50%+ performance uplift over the Neoverse N1. Neoverse V1 also supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and other features in catering the platform for machine learning, cloud, HPC, and similar use-cases.

Quite quickly after that GNU toolchain support began appearing while now the LLVM Clang compiler support has their Neoverse V1 target merged thanks to the punctual work of Arm engineers.

Beginning with the LLVM Clang 12 release

Among the many open-source graphics driver improvements being worked on recently by Red Hat's David Airlie from Lavapipe to OpenCL 3.0 Clover work, another recent effort has been around TTM "multihop" as an improvement for this memory management infrastructure used by the likes of the AMDGPU kernel driver.

Airlie has been working on patches in recent weeks to extend the TTM memory management infrastructure with a "multihop" feature. Right now when needing to move a buffer temporarily across address spaces such as from system RAM to/

Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.

A few weeks back Canonical Group Limited submitted their FY2019 documents with the UK Companies House. They show their 2019 revenue at $119 million USD, up from $97 million

Vulkan 1.2.160 is out this morning as the newest revision to the Vulkan graphics/compute API.

Besides the usual assortment of fixes/clarifications to the specification, Vulkan 1.2.160 brings one new extension. That new extension this week is NVIDIA's VK_NV_fragment_shading_rate_enums.

Last month saw the release of Vulkan 1.2.158 with the fragment shading rate extension added . That extension is for altering the rate at

Intel is contributing a new driver to the Linux kernel for determining whether Thunderbolt / USB4 ports are functional.

The DMA Traffic Test Driver does just that and is used for sending and receiving a specified number of packets on a loopback connection to see whether a port is functioning, primarily for testing purposes during hardware manufacturing.

Besides needing this new Thunderbolt/USB4 driver, a Thunderbolt/USB4 cable needs to be connected back to the host router port or making use of a special loopback dongle where the RX and TX