The Zink Gallium3D code for Mesa that is mapping OpenGL on top of the Vulkan API continues making great progress particularly with the near-daily work by developer Mike Blumenkrantz.

After taking the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code to experimental OpenGL 4.6 support in his development code-base, he's been working on tuning the performance.

After 50~100% performance boosts and even more optimizations after that, Blumenkrantz ended September with Zink performing at roughly half the speed of Intel's

JACK2 1.9.15 released on Thursday as the newest version of this professional-minded sound server focused on real-time, low-latency connections.

JACK2 1.9.15 brings a number of bug fixes, improvements to various JACK tools, deprecates JACK-Session, and makes other improvements. JACK1 continues to be in a bug-fix mode while JACK2 continues advancing slowly and incorporating all of its functionality.

Most notable though with JACK2 1.9.15

The Flash-Friendly File-System ( F2FS ) that is of growing prominence on Android-powered mobile phones and other flash-storage-only Linux systems has some promising improvements with Linux 5.10.

The F2FS feature updates for Linux 5.10 are rather exciting this round. Some of the changes for F2FS with this late 2020 kernel include:

- Age Threshold Garbage Collection (ATGC) for better efficiency and effectiveness of the file-system's garbage

The Wine-based Proton development has been disappointingly quiet in recent weeks but fortunately it's alive and ticking with today's Proton 5.13-1 release for powering Valve's Steam Play to run many modern Windows games gracefully on Linux.

With Proton 5.13-1 there is a big batch of additional Windows games now running properly on Linux:

Red Dead Redemption 2
Horizon Zero Dawn
DEATH STRANDING
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes
Final Fantasy XV
Sea of Thieves
Star Wars: Battlefront II

Following last week's release of Chrome 86 , Google has promoted its Chrome 87 web browser to beta.

Given the video conferencing boom, Chrome 87 Beta is introducing new interfaces for pan / tilt / zoom features on cameras for web-sites using the media track constraints. Users must grant the websites permission to make use of those camera features.

Chrome 87 Beta also comes with a web authentication tab within DevTools, the Cookie Store API exposes HTTP cookies to service workers is out of the origin trials

Given that Intel never shipped a production "Cannon Lake" CPU with its Gen10 graphics enabled, Intel's open-source driver developers have finally removed all Gen10 -specific code from their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in Mesa.

Intel's fabled Cannon Lake launch is finally laid to rest by their Linux graphics driver. Considering that Cannon Lake CPUs never shipped in any major capacity and the lone Core i3 8121U model had its graphics support disabled, they are able to just

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.20 release, KWinFT 5.20 has been released as the fork of KWin and other select components in aiming to offer a better experience.

KWinFT continues to be led by KDE developer Roman Gilg. KWinFT continues to work on not only providing a more robust Wayland compositor but also improved display management and other capabilities .

In terms of KWinFT compared to upstream KWin in Plasma 5.20, Gilg argues, " I believe in regards to stability and robustness KWinFT is

The sound subsystem updates were submitted today for the Linux 5.10 kernel with some interesting changes and new hardware support.

Highlights of the sound driver work for Linux 5.10 includes:

- Intel "Catpt" driver support is new and wired up for the Lynx Point and Wildcat Point audio DSP hardware... Yes, old Haswell / Broadwell era hardware. This deprecates the previous Haswell SoC audio driver code previously providing the audio capabilities. This comes "Due to high range of errors and desynchronization from recommendations

Merged just minutes ago into systemd Git is the new systemd-oomd component pushed along by Facebook.

Systemd-oomd has been developed to improve the Linux out-of-memory / memory pressure behavior and based on Facebook's out-of-memory daemon code that's been extended to not only work for Linux servers but also desktop systems.

The systemd-oomd daemon polls for OOMD-enabled cgroups to monitor and will kill based on memory pressure or swap usage. The systemd-oomd behavior is configurable via