Linux 5.10 is set to support a new feature of AMD Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as part of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

The new feature is supporting hardware-enforced cache coherency and is coming to Linux 5.10 via patches that have been worked on by an Oracle engineer. It's not clear what AMD EPYC CPUs support this hardware-enforced cache coherency as it's checking on a CPUID bit but given the timing it wouldn't be surprising if this is

Going on for more than four years now has been creating a new /dev/random implementation and this Friday marks the 35th revision to this big set of patches that aim for better performance and security.

The code has been through many changes over the years for this new "Linux Random Number Generator" (LRNG).

This new /dev/random works even if the kernel API crypto is not compiled, hash operations are NUMA-node-local for better handling with large parallel systems, other types of

Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache.

Etnaviv now has shader cache support like the other Gallium3D drivers in being able to cache shaders to disk in order to speed-up subsequent reloads of games/applications by avoiding the expensive shader recompilation process when encountering the same shaders on the same driver version.

The Etnaviv shader cache is performed along their NIR code path. Making use of the Etnaviv shader cache saves 1

Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release.

With Taiwins 0.2 the switch was made from using libweston as a basis for the compositor to now using Sway's WLROOTS library. Libweston was dropped over open bugs and other issues and in part the ability to get patches easily merged back into upstream libweston. So with the shortcomings of the Weston library, Taiwins 0.2 is now running on WLROOTS. However, by the next release they

Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa.

In a mailing list post today they note they are down to just 18 test cases failing for the Vulkan CTS while 106,776 tests are passing for this Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. Vulkan games like the respun versions of Quake 1-3 and

Google engineer Steven Perron has laid out their proposal for an XGL cache creator tool for AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK.

As part of their work on relocatable shaders and supporting the offline compilation of Vulkan/SPIR-V shaders, they are working on "xgl_cache_creator" as a tool to take precompiled shaders and construct a file that can be redistributed and passed as the initial data into the Vulkan pipeline cache.

The XGL cache creator tool takes shaders compiled via amdllpc and via optional UUID and

If GNOME 3.38 isn't your cup of tea, you may be interested in trying out the beta of the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop.

The KDE Plasma 5.20 beta was released on Wednesday with a plethora of new additions and improving existing functionality. Plasma 5.20 beta brings better Wayland support, refinements to the look-and-feel of various desktop elements, various improvements to KDE System Settings, and other alterations.

Some of the specific Wayland improvements with Plasma

NVIDIA has once again managed to provide launch-day Linux driver support for their next-generation graphics processors. Today the NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta driver is shipping for Linux support with the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 "Ampere" graphics cards.

The NVIDIA 455.23.04 beta is headlined by this GeForce RTX 3080 / 3090 series support. Unfortunately we still don't have our hands on