Intel has begun adding support for Alderlake-S to their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver.

An initial set of 18 patches amounting to just around 300 lines of new kernel code was sent out today for beginning the hardware enablement work on Alderlake-S from the graphics side.

Yes, it's only a few hundred lines of new driver code due to Alder Lake leveraging the existing Gen12/Tigerlake support. The Alder Lake driver patches similarly re-use some of the same workarounds and

Facebook's BOLT is a multi-year project focused on speeding up the performance of binaries . This open-source project initially focused on being able to better optimize Linux x86_64/ARM64 ELF binaries as a post-link optimizer. BOLT has been seeing much success with even Google using it now for better performance and now there is work to upstream it as part of the LLVM project.

Facebook engineers are hoping to see BOLT added to LLVM as a binary optimization framework. Google has

OpenBSD 6.8 , NetBSD 9.1 , and now TrueNAS 12.0 is out... It seems to be BSD release week!

TrueNAS 12.0 is a big release in that iXsystems has unified TrueNAS and FreeNAS into a single code-base . This week's TrueNAS 12.0-RELEASE is the first production release of the unified FreeNAS+TrueNAS platform now known as TrueNAS CORE and then the professional version as TrueNAS Enterprise.

Besides the structural changes, TrueNAS 12.

The interesting work continues pouring in for Mesa 20.3 as the Q4'2020 feature release to this open-source graphics stack... The latest excitement is on the "Clover" front for Gallium3D OpenCL.

The LLVMpipe software back-end and Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D drivers now are advertising OpenCL image support! This is important for making use of OpenCL acceleration with programs like Darktable and LuxCore, among many other imaging type programs supporting OpenCL.

The lack of OpenCL images

It was just on Monday that Intel's talented open-source developers merged a hefty Tiger Lake graphics optimization into the Mesa 20.3 code that for some games/software can be around ~11% faster thanks to greater caching. Just a day later another optimization has arrived for helping these latest-generation Intel graphics.

Merged on Tuesday was a change to benefit Intel's Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers for making use of the HDC data cache for uniform buffer object (

This week's Vulkan 1.2.158 spec release brought the fragment shading rate extension to control the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This can be useful similar to OpenGL and Direct3D support for helping to allow different, less important areas of the screen be shaded less than areas requiring greater detail/focus.

NVIDIA on Tuesday released the 455.26.02 Linux driver (and 45

The AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel graphics driver continues seeing work on next-generation GPU support around the forthcoming "Big Navi" GPUs.

Building off the Sienna Cichlid support that has come together and made its debut for Linux 5.9, and has further improvements for the now in-development Linux 5.10 kernel, new patches are now surfacing as material that will eventually make its way into Linux 5.11 for release as stable in early 2021.

One of these late feature additions

Mesa 20.3 has merged a long work-in-progress patch series providing support for going from the modern NIR intermediate representation to TGSI as the conventional Gallium3D IR.

The NIR-To-TGSI translation layer has been in the works for most of the year with hopes of using that to eventually kill the Mesa state tracker GLSL-to-TGSI code that is quite large and crusty. While RadeonSI, Iris, and the other larger Gallium3D drivers are making use of NIR for a while