Graphics: Mesa, Vega and ETC2

• RADV Driver Gets Big Patch Series For 8-bit & 16-bit Arithmetic, 8-bit Storage

  A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa. Rhys Perry who started contributing to the Nouveau driver stack has been working on this 8-bit and 16-bit arithmetic support for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. These 8-bit / 16-bit extensions work for AMD Volcanic Islands GPUs and newer. However, the half-floats support needs LLVM 8.0 or newer due to bugs on LLVM 7.

• BACO Power Savings Support Comes To AMD's Vega 12

  The latest addition to AMD's open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, BACO is enabled for Vega 10 and Vega 20. BACO is short for Bus Active, Chip Off as a low-power mode whereby most of the GPU is shut-off during idle periods in order to drastically cut the power consumption of the graphics card. BACO is also known as AMD ZeroCore Power mode.

• Improved ETC2 Texture Compression Lands For Older Haswell/Ivybridge GPUs On Linux

  The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1. This work for the ETC2 texture compression is improving the "fake" support for Intel Gen 7 class graphics, the Ivybridge and Haswell era graphics. This work was done by Igalia to address the lack of native ETC2 coverage on these several year old chips. Following this improved implementation for the fake ETC2 support is also wiring up OES_copy_image support for this extension. ETC2 is the lossy texture compression mandated since OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3.

Bitmain SoC Support Coming To Linux 5.1 - Sophon ARMv8 + RISC-V Chip For Deep Learning

Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel will be initial support for Bitmain's BM1880 System-on-a-Chip as well as the "Sophon Edge" developer board.

Debian Developers' Updates and Python Bits

• Steve Kemp: Updated myy compiler, and bought a watch.

• David Moreno: Dell XPS 13 9380

  Got myself a XPS 13” 9380 that Dell just released as “Developer Edition” with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed. They just released it on January 2019. Ubuntu didn’t last long though. I prefer OS X Mojave than any of the Ubuntu installations. It’s okay though, it’s just not for me.

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2019

  I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 hours from December. I worked 24 hours and so will carry over 1 hour. I prepared another stable update for Linux 3.16 (3.16.63), but did not upload a new release yet.

• Detect the player’s boundary

  In this article, we will start to create the boundary detection mechanism which can be used to help the boy moving around the canvas. We will go slowly where this topic will take a few chapters to complete. In this chapter, we will focus on below issues.

• Threadless mode in Mitogen 0.3

• Getting Started with Pathlib

Tales of colours: GIMP and Latte Dock (KDE)

• Colorization in GIMP

  As part of the Image team at GREYC lab (CRNS, ENSICAEN, University of Caen), I implemented the “fill by line art” algorithm in GIMP, also known as “Smart Colorization“. You may know this algorithm in G’Mic (developed by the same team), so when they proposed me to work with them, I wanted to implement this algorithm in GIMP core. Thus it became my first assignment.

• Latte and a Colors tale...

  A few months ago while I was scratching Latte Dock limits an idea came and haunted my thoughts. How Latte could give the colors freedom for panels and windows that an Android phone already provides? Questions like this arose and solutions appeared suddenly in many different places, but an important and concrete dream prevail in the end.