For those wondering if -- or how much -- of a performance impact mitigations still make regarding Spectre for Intel's long-awaited 10nm+ Ice Lake processors, here is the rundown on the mitigation state and the performance impact.

One of the areas that Phoronix readers have requested testing on with the recent purchase of the Dell XPS 7390 with Core i7 1065G7 is regarding the mitigation state and performance. Ice Lake with its Sunny Cove microarchitecture -- similar to Cascade Lake -- is no longer affected by Meltdown, MDS, or L1TF / Foreshadow.

• Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 Milestone 1 Released With Updates For macOS Benchmarking

  The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available ahead of the stable release later this quarter.

  It's been just one month since the big Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 release with a new result viewer, graphing improvements, and other result viewing enhancements and lower-level improvements. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 as the Q4'2019 release will be more evolutionary improvements.

• libinput and tablet pad keys

  Upcoming in libinput 1.15 is a small feature to support Wacom tablets a tiny bit better. If you look at the higher-end devices in Wacom's range, e.g. the Cintiq 27QHD you'll notice that at the top right of the device are three hardware-buttons with icons. Those buttons are intended to open the config panel, the on-screen display or the virtual keyboard. They've been around for a few years and supported in the kernel for a few releases. But in userspace, they events from those keys were ignored, casted out in the wild before eventually running out of electrons and succumbing to misery. Well, that's all changing now with a new interface being added to libinput to forward those events.

  Step back a second and let's look at the tablet interfaces. We have one for tablet tools (styli) and one for tablet pads. In the latter, we have events for rings, strips and buttons. The latter are simply numerically ordered, so button 1 is simply button 1 with no special meaning. Anything more specific needs to be handled by the compositor/client side which is responsible for assigning e.g. keyboard shortcuts to those buttons.

• libinput and button scrolling locks

  For a few years now, libinput has provided button scrolling. Holding a designated button down and moving the device up/down or left/right creates the matching scroll events. We enable this behaviour by default on some devices (e.g. trackpoints) but it's available on mice and some other devices. Users can change the button that triggers it, e.g. assign it to the right button. There are of course a couple of special corner cases to make sure you can still click that button normally but as I said, all this has been available for quite some time now.

• NVIDIA have released the big new Linux Beta driver 440.26 today

  Today NVIDIA released the 440.26 Beta driver for Linux with a number of new features, enhancements and a few interesting bug fixes.

• NVIDIA 440.26 Beta Linux Driver Brings HDMI 2.1 VRR, VP9 VDPAU Decode + Much More

  NVIDIA today introduced their first beta driver in the 440 Linux branch and it's quite an exciting release!

  The NVIDIA 440.26 Linux beta driver is out this morning and it's bringing with it many new/improved features. There is now VP9 video decoding for VDPAU, HDMI 2.1 VRR for G-SYNC Compatible, and more.

• Libdrm 2.4.100 Released With Bits For Intel Elkhart Lake, Tiger Lake Graphics

  AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák on Wednesday released libdrm 2.4.100 as the newest feature update to this Mesa DRM library.

  On the AMD front there are a number of RAS tests added, a new amdgpu_cs_query_reset_state2 interface, and other expanded AMDGPU test coverage.

• AMDGPU GFX9+ Format Modifiers Being Worked On For Better DCC Handling

  RADV Vulkan driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen of Google has ventured into kernel space in working on format modifiers support for Vega/GFX9 and newer.

  This DRM format modifiers support for GFX9+ is being worked on for helping to evaluate when delta color compression (DCC) can be used and any other requirements around that DCC handling. Bas explained, "This is particularly useful to determine if we can use DCC, and whether we need an extra display compatible DCC metadata plane."

• Free software support for virtual and augmented reality

  A talk at the recent X.Org Developers Conference in Montréal, Canada looked at support for "XR" in free software. XR is an umbrella term that includes both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). In the talk, Joey Ferwerda and Christoph Haag from Collabora gave an overview of XR and the Monado project that provides support for those types of applications.

  Ferwerda started by defining the term "HMD", which predates VR and AR. It is a head-mounted display, which basically means "taking a screen and some sensors and duct-taping it to your face". All of the devices that are being used for XR are HMDs. They typically include some kind of tracking system to determine the position and orientation of the HMD itself. Multiple different technologies, including inertial measurement units (IMUs), photodiodes, lasers, and cameras, are used to do the tracking depending on the device and its use case.

  AR is intended to augment the real world with extra information; the user sees the real world around them, but various kinds of status and additional data is tagged to objects or locations in their view of the world. AR is a rather over-hyped technology these days, he said. The general idea is that users would wear glasses that would augment their view in some fashion, but, unfortunately, what most people think of as AR is Pokémon Go.

  VR uses two screens, one for each eye, to create a 3D world that the user inhabits and can interact with in some fashion. Instead of seeing the real world, the user sees a completely separate world. There are two words that are often used to describe the feel of VR, he said: "presence" and "immersion". That means users are aware of themselves as being part of the VR environment.

  XR encompasses both. Ferwerda said that he is not really sure what the "X" stands for; he has heard "cross reality" and "mixed reality" for XR. Haag said that "extended reality" was another definition that he had heard.

• Intel Now Aiming For Gallium3D OpenGL Default For Mesa 20.0

  For the better part of two years now Intel has been working on this new "Iris" Gallium3D driver for supporting Broadwell "Gen8" graphics and newer as the eventual replacement to their long-standing i965 classic driver. With Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe graphics, it's in fact Iris Gallium3D only. In our testing of Broadwell through the *lakes, this Gallium3D driver has been working out terrific on Mesa 19.2 stable and Mesa 19.3 development. But it looks like Intel is going to play it safe and punt the default change-over to next quarter's Mesa 20.0 cycle.

• Intel Linux Graphics Driver Adds Bits For Jasper Lake PCH

  Details are still light on Jasper Lake, but volleyed onto the public mailing list today was the initial support for the Jasper Lake PCH within the open-source Linux graphics driver side.

  The patch adds in the Jasper Lake PCH while acknowledging it's similar to Icelake and Tigerlake behavior. The Jasper Lake PCI device ID is 0x4D80. The patch doesn't reveal any other notable details but at least enough to note that the Jasper Lake support is on the way. Given the timing, the earliest we could see Intel Jasper Lake support out in the mainline kernel would be for Linux 5.5, which will be out as stable as the first kernel series of 2020 and in time for the likes of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Fedora 32.

• Linux Graphics Drivers Could Have User-Space API Changes More Strictly Evaluated

  In response to both the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics drivers adding new user-space APIs for user-space code that just gets "[thrown] over the wall instead of being open source developed projects" and the increase of Android drivers introducing their own UAPI headaches, Airlie is looking at enforcing more review/oversight when DRM drivers want to make user-space API changes.

  The goal ultimately is to hopefully yield more cross-driver UAPI discussions and in turn avoiding duplicated efforts, ensuring good development implementations prior to upstreaming, and better quality with more developers reviewing said changes.

• xf86-video-ati 19.1 Released With Crash & Hang Fixes

  For those making use of xf86-video-ati on X.Org-enabled Linux desktops, the version 19.1 release brings just a handful of new fixes. This release was announced today by Michel Dänzer who last month departed AMD to now work on Red Hat's graphics team. Michel is sticking around the Mesa/X.Org world for Red Hat's duties but is hoping someone else will be picking up maintenance of the xf86-video-ati/xf86-video-amdgpu DDX drivers going forward. Granted, not a lot of activity happens to these X.Org DDX drivers these days considering more Linux desktops slowly moving over to Wayland, many X11 desktops using the generic xf86-video-modesetting, and these AMD drivers being fairly basic now with all of the big changes in the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver.