Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs.

While not as widely talked about as the likes of KVM, HAXM is Intel's cross-platform execution manager built off Intel Virtualization Technology and exposing a KVM-like interface to user-space. HAXM is open-source but given that Linux has KVM, HAXM is more of use on Windows and macOS for easily accelerating QEMU or the Google Android

Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day.

For XDC2020 there is Microsoft as one of the silver sponsors for the event. Then again, Microsoft has sponsored LinuxTag and other

Mesa 20.2 (or 20.2-RC5) didn't debut last week as intended, but for the interim the Mesa 20.1.x release cycle brought 20.1.8 on Wednesday and now it's been extended to having at least a ninth point release to allow more time until not only Mesa 20.2.0 to ship but Mesa 20.2.1 alignment.

Mesa 20.1.8 brings a RadeonSI workaround for

Following Wednesday's release of GNOME 3.38 was the surprising news of GNOME 40 being the next version as well as a new initiative to improve GNOME extensions.

GNOME developer Sri Ramkrishna has provided more context over the "GNOME Extensions Rebooted" initiative. The aim of this project is to reduce the churn and breakage around GNOME Shell extensions following new releases.

Among their intentions with this initiative is to improve the documentation around GNOME Shell extensions, a continuous integration pipeline / virtual machine for helping extension writers test their

AMD previously confirmed it would be supporting real-time ray-tracing with their next-generation GPUs while now one month out from the Radeon RX 6000 series debut are the first signs of the open-source driver work around GPU ray-tracing.

One day after spotting the patches for AV1 video decode with VCN 3.0 , the latest open-source Radeon driver work to point out is the fundamentals around their ray-tracing introduction.

Hitting the LLVM 12 development codebase today was [AMDGPU

Most information presented during the annual X.Org Developers' Conference doesn't tend to be very surprising or ushering in breaking news, but during today's XDC2020 it was subtly dropped that Arm Holdings appears to now be backing the open-source Panfrost Gallium3D driver.

Panfrost has been developed over the past several years as what began as a reverse-engineered effort by Alyssa Rosenzweig to support Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard hardware. This driver had a slow start but Rosenzweig has been employed by

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais just provided an update during XDC2020 on the Gamescope compositor work as an evolution of Valve's prior "steamcompmgr" X11 window manager used by SteamOS.

Pierre-Loup Griffais has been working on Gamescope for a number of months now as a Wayland-based, Vulkan-minded compositor for use in potential new SteamOS releases but it's also beginning to work well for desktop use-cases. Gamescope is much more efficient than steamcompmgr thanks to Wayland efficiencies,

The feature to provide opt-in flushing of the L1 data cache on each context switch looks like it will be coming with the Linux 5.10 cycle for this functionality providing security benefits but at the cost of further performance degradation.

Earlier this year an Amazon engineer proposed the L1d flushing on context switching in the name of security due to vulnerabilities like MDS. Linux 5.8 was going to add this optional feature but was quickly reverted as Linux creator Linus Torvalds found it to beyond stupid, the

Following today's GNOME 3.38 release a new versioning scheme was announced whereby the next release in six months time will be GNOME 40.0.

Not GNOME 4.0, but GNOME's new versioning scheme is jumping next to GNOME 40.0. Stable point releases will go on as GNOME 40.1, 40.2, 40.3, etc.

Every six month release to GNOME will bump the major version number meaning GNOME 41 will be coming around