Well known KDE developer David Edmundson has been experimenting with a Vulkan-powered KDE Plasma Shell and did manage to get things working with Qt 5.15 using a few modifications.

Given that Qt 5.15 has a tech preview of the new Render Hardware Interface (RHI) with Vulkan support for Qt Quick, Edmundson was experimenting with getting Vulkan rendering the Plasma shell. With a few Plasma changes, the necessary development packages for Vulkan, and some tweaks to the environment variables, he was able to get a

There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

Queued up this past week is coregroup support for POWER processors on Linux. This includes a cleanup of the PowerPC topologies code and adding the Coregroup support, which in this context is about a group/subset of cores on a die that share a resource.

This grouping of cores has the possibility of providing slight benefits to scheduler latency and throughput in some instances. Within this

The sixth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.9 is now available with at least two notable changes in particular.

Prominent in Linux 5.9-rc6 is the fix for the previously reported performance regression hitting 5.9 . In case you missed it from the end of last week, see the article on controlling page lock unfairness as part of addressing the performance regression . That code is now in Linux 5.9-rc6 and the performance is back on track with Linux 5.8 while I will

The next version of the Linux kernel will allow monitoring temperatures of the upcoming AMD Zen 3 processors.

While CPU temperature monitoring support may seem mundane and not newsworthy, what makes this Zen 3 support genuinely interesting is that it's coming pre-launch... This is the first time in the AMD Zen era we are seeing CPU temperature reporting added to the Linux driver pre-launch. Not only is it coming ahead of the CPUs hitting retail channels but the support was added by AMD engineers.

Contrast that to

Earlier this summer Intel engineers added an OpenVINO back-end to the FFmpeg multimedia framework. OpenVINO as a toolkit for optimized neural network performance on Intel hardware was added to FFmpeg for the same reasons there is TensorFlow and others also supported -- support for DNN-based video filters and other deep learning processing.

The support added back in July for FFmpeg with OpenVINO is opt-in under the --enable-libopenvino build switch and requires first building OpenVINO with its C API enabled. This Intel inference engine supports TensorFlow,

In addition to XDC2020 this past week, the Linux Foundation hosted the virtual OpenPOWER Summit North America 2020 event as well with a mix of interesting hardware and software presentations.

Recordings from the virtual event aren't yet available but will be soon via the OpenPOWER Foundation YouTube channel but there are slide decks for many of the presentations.

For those interested in IBM POWER and the open-source POWER ISA, some of the interesting talks with assets available include:

- Peter Czanik talking about the

It's still not clear when Intel SGX support will be accepted for the mainline Linux kernel.

For years now Intel Linux developers have been working on getting their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support and new SGX Enclave driver upstreamed into the kernel. SGX has been around since Skylake but security concerns and other technical reasons have held up this "SGX Foundations" support from being mainlined. There has also been an apparent lack of enthusiasm by non-Intel upstream kernel developers in SGX. This past week saw the 38

The Cloud-Hypervisor project that is led by Intel open-source folks for providing a cloud-focused hypervisor written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release.

Cloud-Hypervisor 0.10 was issued on Friday and this Rust-VMM based project now supports multiple descriptors with VirtIO-Block, memory zone support for finer grained control of memory allocations for the guest, sandboxing improvements with SECCOMP filters, preliminary KVM HyperV emulation control support, and a number of bug fixes.

The work being done

RenderDoc 1.10 was released on Friday for this leading open-source program supporting frame-capture-based debugging on Vulkan, OpenGL / GLES, and Direct3D across Windows, Linux, and Android along with platforms like Stadia and the Nintendo Switch.

RenderDoc 1.10 brings various optimizations and speed improvements, which is always nice to see. RenderDoc should now have lower idle overhead, greater performance when capturing a frame on Vulkan in certain instances, faster cold startup time, improved replay time when switching