Last week saw the main set of ACPI and power management updates for Linux 5.12 while for the second week of the merge window has been the follow-up work with Intel Simple Firmware Interface removal and also an additional ACPI update.

Monado, the leading open-source project implementing The Khronos Group's OpenXR specification for AR/VR devices, is now officially considered a conformant implementation and is marked by its v21.0 release.

SYCL as the single-source C++-based programming model for heterogeneous parallel programming is now revised to the SYCL 2020 specification released today by The Khronos Group.

It's been recently elaborated why the likes of FreeSync support over HDMI aren't coming to the open-source drivers, at least not yet... It stems from the decision by the HDMI Forum to prevent public access to the HDMI specification, which in turn is hurting open-source graphics drivers.

Announced back in 2018 by the MIPI Alliance was the I3C Host Controller Interface (HCI) 1.0 specification whereby a common I3C HCI driver could support a range of multi-vendor sensors and other components relying on I3C.

A new feature release of POCL is now available that is the "Portable Computing Language" offering OpenCL execution atop CPUs and other devices like NVIDIA CUDA that have an LLVM back-end.

The Khronos Group's glTF specification that is a transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues picking up more impressive capabilities as its adoption by a growing range of software packages continue.

Stemming from a GRUB bootloader inquiry and discussion that started over one year ago, a new specification is being proposed for possible adoption by the Linux kernel in being able to pass bootloader or system firmware logs to the operating system kernel for in turn exposing them to user-space.

For the Supercomputing SC20 week there is the release of the OpenMP 5.1 specification with some exciting additions.

Just a year after the Compute Express Link 1.0 and 1.1 interconnect specifications were published, CXL 2.0 is being announced this morning for this high-speed, data center minded specification built atop the PCI Express interface.

Monado as the open-source OpenXR implementation has been working on support for Google's Android platform.

Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK.

The Khronos Group announced this morning that Microsoft and Oculus are the first two companies shipping conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementations.

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime for AR/VR headsets is making progress on integrating open-source positional tracking capabilities.

The Khronos Group today continued with their relatively recent trend of the past few years of open-sourcing their conformance tests. The OpenXR conformance tests are now open-source.

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC.

The Khronos Group has announced the provisional specification of SYCL 2020 as the newest version of this higher-level programming model originally designed for OpenCL that is based on pure single-source C++.

It's been a while since hearing of OpenVG as The Khronos Group's hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics API. But today they announced a "Lite" version of OpenVG 1.1.

The SD 8.0 specification was announced today for SD Express memory cards to allow up to 4GB/s transfer rates by building off the PCIe 4.0 architecture.

For those wondering what the buzz was about earlier this month when there was word of a high quality GPU compression codec going open-source, details on that have now been revealed.

Unicode 13 is now officially available with standardizing 143,859 different characters.

Compression experts Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt with their Binomial consulting firm are about to release a high-quality open-source compression codec for GPUs.

While the cross-distribution AppStream specification standardizes the software component metadata for use by Linux software centers/stores, it turns out many open-source developers aren't interested in or time limited by learning the spec and maintaining the metadata. As such, Matthias Klumpp has now developed the MetaInfo Creator for easily creating this important cross-distro metadata for packages.

Khronos announced last year they would be looking to pursue an analytic rendering API and following the evaluation they have decided to move it forward.

Announced last March was Monado as an open-source implementation of OpenXR, the Khronos standard for AR/VR. Today marks the first release of Monado as version 0.1 so while it's still early on it is showing much progress.

The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API.

It's a busy day in the royalty-free API space.

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones.

Based off AMD's GPUOpen HIP as part of their ROCm stack, researchers at Tampere University in Finland have created HIPCL as leveraging HIP as well as POCL for routing CUDA codes to run on any hardware supporting OpenCL+SPIR-V.

As expected after Intel provided Thunderbolt 3 to the USB Promoter Group royalty-free earlier this year, the USB 4.0 "USB4" specification was published today and indeed based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification.