As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts.

Intel's SIGGRAPH20 focus is largely on their software side with oneAPI .

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued.

Futex2 was sent out in June for initial discussions on this new blocking construct system call

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default.

The DWARF 5 debug data format was published back in 2017 to succeed the now decade old DWARF Version 4. With DWARF 5 there is support for better data compression, various performance improvements, better debug handling around optimized code, and other enhancements over DWARF4. DWARF 5 itself was in development

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders.

Initially for AMD "GFX8" Fiji/Polaris graphics processors but should theoretically work as well for older GFX6/GFX7 hardware is the trap handler merged on Monday. Newer GFX9/GFX10 GPUs will require a separate trap handler implementation due to hardware differences.

The RADV trap handler will help in diagnosing different issues with useful debug information provided.

The hipSYCL effort has been about supporting the Khronos SYCL single-source language built on C++ across any CPU with OpenMP as well as AMD Radeon GPUs via ROCm and NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA. The hipSYCL effort has a new "Lite" experimental runtime under development.

The hipSYCL effort is just one of several SYCL efforts in the ecosystem for running SYCL across CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators. Here's a look via the hipSYCL project how their effort compares to others:

One of many performance optimization projects being pursued by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt in the GNOME space has been working to lower the latency when using NVIDIA's proprietary driver to address high latency spikes in certain situations as well as stuttering on the desktop. The Ubuntu developer has had patches under testing for months while this past week a latest revision was made available.

Daniel van Vugt reworked the NVIDIA latency/stutter fixing patches. With the latest iteration there should be "even lower latency" and he now characterizes the latency

The "first real user" of the BPF user mode driver facility is on the way for Linux 5.10.

Hitting bpf-next a few days ago is some interesting work destined for Linux 5.10. " This patch set is the first real user of user mode driver facility. The general use case for user mode driver is to ship vmlinux with preloaded BPF programs. In this particular case the user mode driver populates bpffs instance with two BPF iterators. In several months BPF_LSM project would

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has been working on "GLX Delay" as a meand of offering accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The proposed code is going through Mesa even though it's for the proprietary NVIDIA driver benefit and also requires a change to the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd).

This work-in-progress code does allow the likes of glxgears and glxinfo to now successfully run on XWayland with the NVIDIA proprietary driver. Adam prominently noted, "due to

It's been one week already since feature work ended on Linux 5.9 and that means it's time for the 5.9-rc2 kernel. Like clockwork, Linux Torvalds has shipped Linux 5.9-rc2 with the initial batch of bug/regression fixes as well as some late changes for the cycle.

Linus noted in the release announcement for Linux 5.9-rc2 that " Nothing in particular stands out, there's a random collection of fixes and updates in here