It's been three months since AMD published a security whitepaper outlining the possibility of a side channel attack with PSF. The Predictive Store Forwarding functionality is new to AMD Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 / EPYC 7003 series) processors and as part of their security analysis they are allowing users the ability to opt-out of using this feature in the name of greater security but the feature still hasn't been picked up for the mainline Linux kernel.

While Valve has been working on Vulkan-based rendering for Source Engine games by making use of DXVK for translating the game engine's native Direct3D calls to the Vulkan API, with some yet-to-be-merged Mesa patches around Gallium Nine there is much better performance to see with Gallium Nine at least for the RadeonSI driver.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender.

The Qt Company has announced the debut of Qt 6.2 Alpha as it prepares for its September release with many more modules finally making the transition from Qt5 to Qt6.

Announced two years ago was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an FPGA-based soft CPU core.

Landing in mainline Mesa 21.2 development code last week was the "Crocus" Gallium3D driver for old Intel hardware spanning from the Intel 965 chipset days "Gen4" up through Crocus supporting Haswell "Gen7" graphics. The i965 to Haswell span has been the focus since the official Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver already in Mesa supports the Broadwell "Gen8" up through all current Intel UHD/Xe Graphics. But now Crocus with the latest Mesa code has added Gen8 support.

Intel-owned Habana Labs has submitted their set of driver updates to char/misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 merge window.

Even though Vulkan ray-tracing support on Intel graphics hardware isn't coming until Xe HPG avaiability, Intel's Linux graphics driver developers have been preparing since last year. In preparation for the Xe HPG launch, Intel's open-source talent have for many months already been preparing the Vulkan ray-tracing functionality wither another batch of code being merged today.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger continues working on restructuring the company and today announced some new leadership as well as business unit changes.

While in the past we have seen Intel CPU microcode updates lead to measurable performance differences on multiple occasions, this month's CPU microcode update doesn't end up being all that concerning for real-world performance.

Hitting mainline Mesa today for Mesa 21.2 next quarter is PanVK as the open-source Vulkan driver in development for newer Arm Mali GPUs.

NVIDIA announced yesterday they would be releasing DLSS Linux support tomorrow and indeed they have delivered on that first milestone of Deep Learning Super Sampling support for Linux gamers. NVIDIA has published their first 470 driver series beta in the form of the NVIDIA 470.42.01 build.

AMD today released FidelityFX Super Resolution that was announced earlier this month at Computex. Today it's Windows-only with no Linux support being introduced. FidelityFX Super Resolution is open-source but the code drop will not be until next month.

SiFive today is announcing the Performance P550 as the fastest RISC-V processor yet while also announcing the Performance P270 too.

AMD has shifted all their graphics processors and APUs prior to Polaris / GCN 1.4 to being legacy and will not be supported by their new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases.

The latest JavaScript API to see a public working draft out of the W3C is for a Web Neural Network API.

The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has been in development since 2001. It took until September 2018 for the Haiku R1 Beta and then last summer was succeeded by Haiku R1 Beta 2. Now a year later the third beta for this inaugural release is now approaching.

Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host.

NVIDIA announced earlier this month that they would be bringing DLSS to Linux / Steam Play and tomorrow they will be introducing that initial driver support.

Stemming from last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 release and then the RHEL 8.4 based updates to Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, and CentOS 8, RockyLinux has today reached general availability on its v8.4 release.

Linux 5.14 is bringing a new input driver to support an open-source joystick that can be used for DIY electronics purposes and other use-cases. The schematics and firmware are open-source for building the joystick device yourself or can be purchased for about $10 USD.

Last week Intel shipped a big update to their open-source Intel Graphics Compiler "IGC" that is used currently by their Windows driver, their Linux compute stack, and potentially their Linux graphics drivers moving ahead.

Vulkan 1.2.182 is out and on top of various documentation fixes/clarifications, there are a few new extensions added with this revision.

Following last month's Unvanquished 0.52 beta for this open-source game that has long been in development, Sunday marked the release of Unvanquished 0.52.1.

Linus Torvalds is celebrating Father's Day by releasing Linux 5.13-rc7. Kernel maintainers and testers managed to keep him happy the father of Linux happy this week by keeping to a small change set for this late-stage release candidate.

Published all the way back in September 2019 was a Linux driver for supporting the Pass-Through DMA controller for EPYC processors. The PTDMA hardware allows for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Now mid-way through 2021 that AMD PTDMA Linux driver remains in the works and is up to its tenth driver revision while waiting to see if it's now ready for mainline or further changes are still deemed necessary.

Back in April the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system was updated for Linux 5.12 compatibility while now with Linux 5.13 being right around the corner, Edward Shishkin has updated the experimental Reiser5 file-system code for v5.12 compatibility.

Earlier this month Linux 5.13 disabled Intel's ENQCMD functionality for upcoming Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors as the kernel software code around it was deemed "broken beyond repair". More of the recent Intel-submitted patches around reworking kernel code in preparation for upcoming CPU features has been found to be rather hairy after already being mainlined and thus another batch of urgent x86 fixes were sent in this morning.

While vendors are increasingly just focused on Vulkan (and Direct3D under Windows), there still is plenty of OpenGL software out there especially in the workstation space where software vendors are slow to adapt. Well known RadeonSI OpenGL developer Marek Olšák of AMD landed another performance optimization this week that should benefit the likes of SPECviewperf.

The virtual KDE Akademy 2021 conference kicked off on Friday and runs through the 25th. This annual summertime event of the KDE desktop community is attended by hundreds but again carried out online due to the pandemic.

Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK (formerly D9VK) and related Steam Play / Proton graphics related efforts has submitted a proposal for a Wayland Surface-Suspension protocol.

While Debian 11 is coming up soon and its full freeze is under one month away, Debian 10.10 is out this weekend as the latest routine point release.

Merged last week to mainline LLVM 13.0 was the new "GFX1013" target for the AMDGPU shader compiler. Well, it landed twice as at first had to be reverted after breaking the build bots / sanitizer testing.

Libzip as the widely-used C library for accessing. creating, and modifying Zip archives is out with a new feature release.

Even with the warm summer weather and many municipalities loosening pandemic lockdown restrictions, KDE developers remain quite busy this summer with a variety of improvements to this open-source desktop.

For nearly one decade there has been talk of UPower 1.0 while in 2021 that still has yet to materialize for this former "DeviceKit-Power" project but at least now there is UPower v0.99.12 as the first release in two years.