IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community.

The A2O processor core is now open-source as a POWER ISA core for embedded use in SoC designs. The A2O offers better single threaded performance over its predecessor and supports 2-way SMT, PowerISA 2.07, and a modular design.

The Vulkan System Integration working group has decided to publish their work-in-progress extension on VK_EXT_present_timing as their effort to expose the presentation engine's display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time.

VK_EXT_present_timing is a big effort about helping to reduce stuttering and use-cases like better handling of variable refresh rate setups and other scenarios in wanting to ensure the presentation of a frame/image happens on schedule to avoid anomalies.

VK

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Linux OpenCL/Level-Zero compute stack as well as now being used by their Windows graphics driver and potentially their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in the future is out with a new release.

IGC releases tend to come frequent with a large team working on this open-source graphics compiler code while the 1.0.4944 milestone is a bit of a larger release.

IGC 1.0.4944 has a lot of

For just over a decade the Lightworks high-end, cross-platform video editing software has been owned by EditShare after it was acquired from Gee Broadcast. Now though LWKS Software Ltd has been established and acquired this video editing software from EditShare.

LWKS Software Ltd is the new owner of Lightworks as a "forward-thinking company dedicated to the content creation industry." EditShare's QScan software was also part of this deal.

LWKS Software Ltd is led by former employees of EditShare. The software developers and product engineers

One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU's render/blitter/video engines were being utilized.

That work for per-client "engine busyness" reporting went through a few rounds of review but as of Linux 5.9 there still isn't the support within Intel's i915 kernel driver.

The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting.

The plan had called for ramping up the XZ compression settings for Fedora's SquashFS image in order to deliver a smaller image. Some numbers being talked about in the proposal were saving around 142MiB for a roughly 6.5% longer install time.

While the smaller image size is a win for those on limited/metered bandwidth as well as reducing the hosting

Linus Torvalds has decided to do away with the "soft scrollback" functionality found in the FBCON and VGACON kernel code as a sign of the times.

VGACON/FBCON for the basic Linux console has supported a software scrollback buffer with the Shift + PageUp keyboard sequence for scrolling up in the output for contents out of view. But with most people not making heavy use of the frame-buffer console these days and the code being unmaintained, it's being stripped out from Linux 5.9.

As a post-

Ahead of the RDNA 2 / Navi 2 reveal on October 28 , AMD has shown off the first official render of a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card.

On Twitter AMD commented, " Take a first look at the design of the new Radeon RX 6000 series. Our upcoming @AMD #RDNA2 graphics cards will feature a brand new cooler design. " They also noted there is a render of the Radeon RX 6000 series card within Fortnite for those wanting to explore

Prior to tagging Mutter 3.38 for this week's GNOME 3.38 desktop release there was a last-minute change around the DMA-BUF screencasting feature.

Earlier this year GNOME developers wired up DMA-BUF screencasting support for GNOME on Wayland . With making use of DMA-BUF for buffer sharing to avoid excess image copies between CPU and GPU memory, the screencasting functionality is much more efficient. GNOME screencasting is just one of many projects making use of this zero-copy buffer sharing support.