The V3DV driver for providing Vulkan support on the Raspberry Pi 4 is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance and once squaring that away along with other lingering bits they will be pursuing the upstreaming of this driver within Mesa.

Upstreaming the V3DV driver in Mesa will be a huge help for those wanting to see this Vulkan driver readily available on the many Linux distributions shipping Raspberry Pi spins and sticking to just upstream/mainline code. V3DV is very close to Vulkan 1.0 conformance with Quake

XDC2020 as the annual gathering of X.Org developers was due to take place in Poland this year but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused it to be yet another conference happening exclusively online. Day 1 of XDC2020 has just begun.

XDC2020 is organized by Intel's graphics engineering team in Gdansk, Poland. The virtual event is leveraging existing Linux Plumbers Conference infrastructure as well as YouTube for video streaming. Intel is the platinum sponsor of XDC20

Compression expert Rich Geldreich who previously worked for the likes of Valve and Unity prior to co-founding his own consulting firm has now made the Crunch and LZHAM technologies available under the public domain.

LZHAM is a lossless data compression codec with a compression ratio comparable to LZMA but with 1.5~8x faster decompression. This LZ-based data compression codec performs excitingly well for decompression purposes. More details on LZHAM via this repository .

Crunch meanwhile as Binomial's advanced DXTc texture compression and transcoding library is also out

After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today.

Rav1e 0.4 Alpha delivers from a few percent to over 100% speed-up on x86-64 depending upon quality settings and more. The Arm 64-bit speed-ups are even more pronounced with the Rav1e 0.4 performance slated to offer at least a 50% speed-up at

Gentoo Linux is looking to improve the kernel maintenance experience by offering up Ebuilds that make it easier to maintain the kernel through the package manager -- including prebuilt binary kernels.

The three kernel packages now offered are sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel providing a Linux kernel with the Gentoo "genpatches" applied, sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin as a prebuilt kernel binary of the gentoo-kernel, and sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel as an upstream kernel build without any extra patches. The hope is

We still don't have our hands on the GeForce RTX 3080 yet and remains to be seen when we will get our hands on RTX 30 series hardware for Linux testing, but at least there's a pretty good rhythm for how the NVIDIA Linux support will play out.

For well over a decade now and in fact closer to two decades, NVIDIA generally provides launch day support in their official, proprietary Linux driver. I think there's just been a few times where there has been

It turns out the Radeon RX 6000 series will have AV1 hardware video decode capabilities.

In addition to Intel Xe / Tigerlake and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series supporting AV1 hardware decoding, it's now firmed up that the next-gen Navi 2 GPUs will also have AV1 decode.

As previously reported, the AMD next-gen GPUs feature VCN 3.0 for Video Core Next. The previous VCN 3.0 Linux/open-source patches didn't reveal AV1

Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer.

NVFS aims to be a speedy file-system for persistent memory like Intel Optane DCPMM. NVFS is geared for use on DAX-based (direct access) devices and maps the entire device into a linear address space that bypasses the Linux kernel's block layer and buffer cache.

Previously there was the NOVA file-system for persistent memory but work on that out-

Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses.

While the engine code has always been open-source, game assets like artwork