Graphics: RadeonSI Gets NIR Improvements, Enabled By Default For Civilization VI, Mesa 19 is Almost Ready, Now at Fifth RC

• RadeonSI Gets NIR Improvements, Enabled By Default For Civilization VI

  The RadeonSI NIR back-end as an alternative to its longstanding TGSI usage continues to be improved upon as a prerequisite for supporting OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V ingestion. A fresh batch of RadeonSI NIR work was merged today, including to enable it by default for one Linux game. Several developers landed the latest NIR code into Mesa 19.1 Git on Monday, including Marek Olšák who added a radeonsi_enable_nir option to DriConf for allowing the NIR usage to be flipped on a per-game/per-executable basis. Up to now users had to manually set R600_DEBUG=nir (or now, AMD_DEBUG=nir as the other syntax now supported in recent days with Mesa 19.1). But now with this DriConf option, it can "whitelist" games as needed.

• mesa 19.0.0-rc5

  Hi List, Hot off the press is mesa 19.0-rc5. Due to a number of still opened bugs in the release tracker this will not be the final release, and I predict at least one more release candidate before the final release happens. Just an FYI, I will not be working Thursday or Friday this week, so if I don't respond to nominations after tommorrow don't be surprised :) Anyway, in the rc5 release we have a little bit of everything, but not too much of any one thing: - nir - radv - v3d - intel - swr - anv - spirv - meson - radeonsi Dylan

• Mesa 19.0-RC5 Released As The Cycle Drags Into Overtime

  Mesa 19.0-RC5 was issued a short time ago as the latest release candidate for Mesa 19.0. Due to blocker bugs remaining, at least one more release candidate is likely next week before seeing the official release. The 19.0 bug tracker still shows more than a half dozen bugs blocking the release. These blocker bugs range from 1~2% performance regressions in Unigine benchmarks with Skylake graphics to other random performance regressions and also some test case failures on the Intel side.

A developer is working on turning a Nintendo Switch into an Android tablet

The Nintendo Switch is Nintendo’s latest console/handheld, and it’s doing really well for itself in terms of sales and appeal. It also marks a change in attitude from Nintendo as well, as the device is not only powered by an Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip, but the company even reportedly wanted to employ the now-defunct Cyanogen Inc. to develop their operating system. Since the discovery of the Fusée Gelée vulnerability, Switch modding has really taken off in the community. Users have theorized for a long time now whether it would be possible to port Android to the Switch. After all, Linux has been ported to it and the device uses the Tegra X1 SoC for which there is documentation to refer to. All that’s left is the blood, sweat, and tears of developers interested enough in porting Android. One developer by the name of ByLaws is taking the challenge of turning a Nintendo Switch into an Android tablet.

Color profile support for Xfce

In order to enable people to set up color management I decided to start with the frontend. In theory you can already get a working setup in Xfce by relying on cupsd (for printers), saned (for scanners) and xiccd (for displays) and handling colord through the colormgr commandline tool. What we managed at FOSDEM was still pretty rough but I took a few days (read: nights) and polished the dialog so it became more and more user friendly and the final product can be seen in the screenshot above.