Last week I mentioned how Mesa landed Vulkan 1.1 support for the V3DV driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. With those changes in Mesa Git, The Khronos Group has now officially granted this driver Vulkan 1.1 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4.

AMDGPU changes already queued up in DRM-Next for Linux 5.16 brought initial code for DisplayPort 2.0 ahead of next-gen GPUs with this connectivity support. Sent out today as a separate pull request is wiring up the DisplayPort 2.0 Multi-Stream Transport (MST) capability for the AMDGPU kernel driver.

A new pull request is pending for implementing multi-queue block (blk-mq) support within OpenZFS' Zvol code, which can lead to sizable performance benefits.

While the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs are a decade old, the mainline Linux kernel continues working to improve the power management / thermal behavior for them in order to deal with heating issues for devices relying on these SoCs.

Linus Torvalds normally releases new kernel versions on Sundays like clockwork, but yesterday was one of the rare occasions where that trend was interrupted.

Ahead of Intel's inaugural Intel Innovation event taking place virtually later this week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger published an open letter to an open ecosystem.

Just one week ago Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe was optimizing the kernel to get 8 million IOPS on a single CPU core. He progressed the week hitting around ~8.9M IOPS per-core and began to think he was hitting the hardware limits and running out of possible optimizations. However, this week he is kicking things off by managing to hit 10 million IOPS!

While Linux 5.15 isn't even making its debut for another week or two, there is already a lot to look forward to when it comes to Linux 5.16. Here is a look at some of the new features expected for the 5.16 cycle.

Following the recent RISC-V Bitmanip work in Binutils, the GCC 12 compiler has now landed preliminary support for the RISC-V ISA's bit manipulation extension.

Meson 0.60 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this increasingly popular and widely-used cross-platform build system.

Earlier this month AMD's open-source driver engineers began posting patches for the AMDGPU kernel driver to handle USB4 DP tunneling. That tunneling for DisplayPort with USB4 is for upcoming Yellow Carp / Rembrandt APUs. The USB4 driver bring-up within AMDGPU continues.

In addition to Loongson working on Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture, the first bits of the GNU toolchain support for this Chinese CPU architecture have been merged.

Earlier this year was news that Google is finally working to open-source their Fibers user-space scheduling framework. For the better part of the past decade they have been developing this user-space scheduling framework and finally now are working on offering public, open-source code intended for upstream around their work.

Bareflank, as what started a few years ago as a Linux hypervisor written in modern C++ and focused on security and other new features as a "hypervisor SDK" of sorts, is now up to version 3.0.

For a number of months Mediatek engineers have been posting some Linux kernel driver code for bringing up the AI Processing Unit (APU) within the MT8192 SoC while out this weekend is the complete patch series at more than eight thousand lines of code.

Recently I wrote about Vortex86 processors seeing detection work under Linux for improving the state of these aging x86 32-bit SoCs. That work is now slated to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle for those running these aging SoCs/processors.

It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements.

The FreeBSD team has begun preparations for their next release process with an aim to ship FreeBSD 12.3 in early December.

Last week was the virtual Vulkanised Fall 2021 event hosted by The Khronos Group. The two-day event was focused on all things Vulkan and for those that missed it all of the slide decks and other material are now available.

Wine 6.20 was released today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners.

PipeWire 0.3.39 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this audio/video stream solution for Linux systems that continues proving itself capable of replacing the roles of JACK and PulseAudio, among other use-cases.

While for many years we have been accustomed to seeing Intel land their new hardware feature enablement work in the Linux kernel and related components well ahead of products shipping, occasionally there are lapses due to various internal and external timings. The launch of Sapphire Rapids is quickly approaching and one of the major additions is Advanced Matrix Extensions with its Linux support still being in the works.

GCC 12 isn't seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system.

Valve continues embracing DXVK-Native for allowing more of their older games to target Vulkan by using this Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer for native games. DXVK-Native 1.9.2a is out with the latest fixes and improvements.

Intel's "parallel submission" user-space API for their i915 kernel graphics driver has been queued into DRM-Next today ahead of the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle.