Vulkan 1.2.155 is out this morning as a small weekly update over last week's spec revision that brought the Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 for easing software-based Vulkan implementations running atop other graphics APIs.

Vulkan 1.2.155 is quite a tiny release after that big release last week, but there aren't even any documentation corrections/clarifications and just a sole new extension.

That new extension making up the Vulkan 1.2.155 changes is

Broadcom engineers have prepared their Linux network driver infrastructure for supporting 200G link speeds.

Coming to Broadcom's "bnxt_en" Linux network driver in Linux 5.10 are the necessary alterations for handling 200G links. It was back in late 2018 when Broadcom first announced the world's first 200G Ethernet controller utilizing 50G PAM-4 and PCI Express 4.0. Now as we approach the end of 2020 and prepping

Rob Clark who founded the Freedreno/MSM driver project and current Googler sent in the MSM direct rendering manager driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.10 merge window. This time around the Adreno kernel graphics/display driver has some notable additions.

With Linux 5.10 the MSM DRM driver now has DisplayPort output support for Adreno hardware with DP outputs.

The second big feature besides DisplayPort support is per-process GPU pagetables are now enabled for Adreno 600 series graphics. For several years MSM has been

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.9-rc7 as the newest weekly test candidate for Linux 5.9 . Due to the regressions encountered this cycle and prominent issues being resolved late, he's looking at releasing Linux 5.9 in two weeks time rather than next week.

Linus began the 5.9-rc7 announcement with, " So we finally have all the issues I know about sorted out - the fix for the VM issue I mentioned in the rc6 announcement is here, as is

Given the interest from the RealSR-NCNN Vulkan benchmarks on various NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards looking at this neural network inference framework with the task of upscaling an image by 4x the resolution using RealSR, here are some more benchmarks of the NCNN framework accelerated by Vulkan on different GPUs under Ubuntu Linux.

The numbers this weekend are of Vulkan NCNN with different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards I had access to and running inference benchmarks on various models as opposed to the real-world RealSR-NCNN performance numbers from

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers.

SoMainline developers that work to upstream Sony Xperia device support for Linux sent out a large set of patches this weekend in hopes of upstreaming the SDM630 and SDM660 SoC support. In turn this would allow more mid-range mobile phone devices based on these

Patches sent out on Friday provide an initial DP-HDMI2.1 PCON implementation for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver.

This DP-HDMI2.1 PCON is protocol converter support as part of the VESA DisplayPort 2.0 specification for interfacing with HDMI 2.1 displays. This protocol converter support for DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 is necessary even for use with converter chips like the Realtek RTD2173. With these tentative Linux kernel patches, the Intel graphics driver developers working on this code were

Virt-Manager 3.0 quietly got released a little more than one week ago.

While Red Hat decided to deprecate the virt-manager UI in RHEL8 in favor of the Cockpit web console for managing VMs, the virt-manager project continues pushing along. Cole Robinson released Virt-Manager 3.0 and while it's a big version bump not a whole lot has changed.

Virt-Manager 3.0 comes with a number of user interface changes to enhance the experience, like simplifying the clone VM

For those following the development of Zink as a software OpenGL driver built atop the Vulkan API, there are some new performance numbers to discuss this weekend.

Following the reports last week of 50~100% performance improvements for Zink by independent developer Mike Blumenkratz, he shared more details this week on his testing and the optimizations achieved.

As outlined a few days ago, he's been profiling and optimizing for the demanding Unigine Heaven OpenGL tech demo .

From where he started he is up ~70%