Vulkan 1.2.156 was released this morning and while it's a small revision to the API documentation it does come with a new extension.

Vulkan 1.2.156 adds one new extension and then has a fix for referring to memory import/export using the term payload rather than "the same underlying memory." The new extension is VK_EXT_device_memory_report.

VK_EXT_device_memory_report is an interesting Vulkan extension for profiling and

NVIDIA's online GTC 2020 event kicks off today with a ton of announcements coming across the wire but not one many Linux users have been clamoring to hear more about.

In addition to announcing the $59 NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB , this morning has also seen the announcements for the Ampere RTX A6000 and A40 graphics cards , Jarvis and Merlin in open beta , more Arm ecosystem support , EGX edge AI platform , and more.

In addition the GTC 202

AMD released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver at the end of September that went seemingly unnoticed. Only today when seeing "20.40" firmware binaries hitting the linux-firmware.git tree was I even aware of this updated packaged AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver focused on enterprise distributions.

The most notable feature with the Radeon Software for Linux 20.40 driver is supporting the Radeon RX 5300 series. The Radeon RX 5300 series is a 100 Watt

Canonical kernel engineer Andrea Righi has sent out an updated patch series implementing opportunistic memory reclaim support as a way of forcing the kernel to attempt to reclaim system memory.

Opportunistic memory reclaim provides a user-space interface to trigger an artificial memory pressure condition for the kernel to force it to reclaim memory. By artificially triggering a memory reclaim event before the system RAM is actually under pressure is being done in hopes of keeping the system more responsive.

This opportunistic memory reclaim support would help reduce the system memory footprint, speed-up

Windows x86 binaries can now run on POWER9 hardware under Linux with Wine thanks to Hangover.

The Wine Hangover project was initially started for running Windows x86_64 programs on 64-bit ARM . While Wine itself supports AArch64 and other architectures, it isn't focused on emulating support across architectures -- that's where Hangover comes in.

While Hangover has been ARM focused, over the past year Raptor Computing Systems has been helping Wine developers in extending it to support IBM

Presumably with Xe-HP in mind, Intel engineers continue working on adding DMA-BUF support to the Linux kernel's RDMA code.

Intel engineers are working to support DMA-BUF for peer-to-peer transactions over PCI Express between RDMA NICs and supported PCIe devices/drivers.

The peer-to-peer support with capable hardware and drivers means bypassing the system memory when the CPU doesn't need to access it, in turn offering better performance. AMD engineers have also been investing in Linux's

The Free Software Foundation on Sunday marked thirty five years since its founding by Richard Stallman.

It was on 4 October 1985 that Stallman founded the FSF as a non-profit to further the free software movement.

In marking 35 years, the Free Software Foundation is encouraging celebrations in manners like experimenting with the GNU Emacs editor, replacing non-free programs with freedom-minded programs, replacing Android with F-Droid, and trying a full-free FSF-approved GNU/Linux distribution.

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While normally the Linux kernel sees its stable releases after about seven weeks worth of release candidates, today Linux 5.9-rc8 was issued in allowing an extra week of testing.

Following that page lock unfairness performance regression and other issues this cycle as well as more changes than usual late in the cycle, as expected Linus Torvalds today issued Linux 5.9-rc8 rather than going straight to Linux 5.9 stable. In turn this means the Linux 5.9 official release will happen next weekend on