It's looking like Paragon Software's "NTFS3" read-write Linux driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system is on a trajectory where we could see it land possibly with the Linux 5.11 kernel kicking off at year's end. Friday marked the eleventh iteration of these patches that Paragon previously offered to commercial customers but is now in the process of being upstreamed.

It's been an interesting journey since Paragon announced in August their NTFS3 driver that they were interested in upstreaming

The Linux 5.11 kernel will bring support for the ASUS "N-Key" keyboard that is used by nearly all of the current ASUS gaming laptops.

This keyboard has a product ID of 0x1866 and basically used across the current line-up of ASUS gaming laptops. Standard keyboard functionality works with existing kernels, but the next cycle will bring support for the function keys and other controls.

A 100+ lines of code patch to the Linux HID-ASUS driver is required

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe , the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation.

David Airlie of Red Hat who has been working a lot on LLVMpipe submitted the Mesa 20.2 LLVMpipe driver for the Khronos certification process under the SPI/X.Org

The Linux kernel's frame-buffer console (FBCON) is set to drop accelerated scrolling support since it isn't widely used and now found to be "full of bugs" plaguing the code-base.

Google's Syzbot that continuously fuzzes the Linux kernel using Syzkaller recently began fuzzing the FBCON code within the kernel. As a result of that exposure, the developers are now well aware with " solid proof that it's full of bugs. "

The best solution from the developer perspective has been to

Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications.

Their new ETrace tool is written in the Go programming language and leverages ptrace for performance and debug analysis. Current functionality of ETrace allows monitoring the time it takes an application until its window is displayed, the files accessed during the duration of the program, and other common profiling/debug features.

ETrace has various features integrated around Snap such as being able to automatically clear

Intel Compute-Runtime 20.43.18277 is out this morning as the latest version of the company's open-source graphics compute stack for HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support.

It was the previous Compute-Runtime release two weeks back that brought OpenCL 3.0 for Broadwell through Ice Lake with Gen12/Tigerlake having already seen CL 3.0 support as a new platform. That OpenCL 3.0 support

On top of the AMD Zen L3 cache optimizations hitting Mesa 20.3 today, Marek Olšák has also landed his RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code for optimizing OpenGL uber shaders.

Marek added a "inline_uniforms" DriConf option to the RadeonSI driver that implements inlinable uniforms.

The goal with this is to improve the performance for uber shaders, or rather large shaders with lots of possible branches at run-time.

The "inline_uniforms" DriConf option with Mesa 20.3'

You may recall going back to 2018 that well known open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olsak was working on Mesa optimizations around the AMD Zen architecture . In particular, better handling of Mesa for Zen's L3 cache design. A rewritten implementation of that has now landed along with some other improvements.

Marek discovered his L3 cache topology code was incorrect and ended up rewriting it to "make Mesa on my AMD CPU faster." The code is catering to AMD Ryzen processors but it'

More than a decade ago Linux users tended to be envious of Sun Microsystems' Solaris for ZFS and DTrace as the two most interesting technical selling points of the platform. In that time OpenZFS is now extremely vibrant for offering ZFS on BSD and Linux systems while DTrace is barely brought up these days. This tracing framework originally developed for Solaris was fantastic back in the day but over the years Linux has stepped up its game with various efforts. Now as we hit the end of 2020, Oracle engineers continue working