More Icelake Graphics Fixes Are On The Way With The Linux 5.2 Kernel

Intel's open-source developers sent in another pull request this morning to DRM-Next of additional feature material they are planning on having in the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel.

Already for this next kernel in previous pull requests they staged the Elkhart Lake graphics support, promoted Gen11 / Icelake out of being experimental graphics along with other Gen11 graphics fixes, and a variety of other fixes and low-level improvements.

Stable Steam Client Gets Vulkan Pipeline Collection, Better NTFS, Steam Play Fixes

On Wednesday night Valve issued their latest stable Steam client update and carries much of the work we've seen out of their recent beta releases.

This Steam client update is notable for Linux users in that Steam Play configuration settings are now exposed in Big Picture Mode, the important fix for 0-byte downloads / missing data files for Steam Play titles, Steam Overlay issues, automatic update issues with these titles relying upon Proton, and other Steam Play bugs.

GLAMOR Sees More Improvements For What Will Eventually Be X.Org Server 1.21

We haven't been seeing as much GLAMOR activity these days but then again the pace of X.Org Server development has certainly slowed up in recent years. GLAMOR as a reminder allows for X.Org Server 2D acceleration to happen in a generic manner via OpenGL / GLES and has been a common area for improvement.

There hasn't been much to report on GLAMOR's development in recent months with it generally working out well already on X.Org Server 1.20, at least for desktop systems with modern OpenGL drivers. Eric Anholt of Broadcom on Wednesday landed the latest GLAMOR code into X.Org Server Git.

Vulkan 1.1.107 Released With Support For Headless Surfaces

Vulkan 1.1.107 is out today as the newest version of the Vulkan graphics/compute API.

Vulkan 1.1.107 contains the usual work on different documentation clarifications/corrections while a new extension is VK_EXT_headless_surface, which was contributed by Arm.

Mesa 19.1.0 release plan

Mesa 19.1 Enters Feature Freeze In Two Weeks, Releasing Around 21 May

Juan A. Suarez Romero of Igalia is serving as the release manager for Mesa 19.1 and sent out a reminder on Monday of the planned release schedule for this quarterly driver update.

The release schedule calls for the feature freeze and initial release candidate to happen on 30 April. Following that will be weekly release candidates until the final release is ready. The hope is Mesa 19.1.0 can ship on 21 May, but as we've seen very frequently out of recent release cycles, there is often times release delays of days if not weeks. But long story short, Mesa 19.1.0 should be released around late May or early June.

Wayland Has A Color Manager Calibration Protocol In The Works

The latest Wayland protocol in the works is a color manager calibration protocol.

This experimental protocol is designed to allow a compositor to calibrate a given output, an interface for a calibration/profiling application to send the needed colors to the display, an interface to inform the application of the display depth, setting a specific color on an output, loading an ICC profile for a compositor, and saving the last profile loaded.

Nouveau Developer Working On OpenGL Extension To Help With Reverse-Engineering

Longtime open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developer Ilia Mirkin is drafting a new OpenGL extension proposal for helping out in driver reverse-engineering efforts.

The proposed GL_MESA_debug_operations extension is about making it easier to insert arbitrary commands into existing shaders to better understand these operations in different combinations. This extension is designed to help reverse engineering activities like Nouveau as they try to understand NVIDIA's hardware behavior but could have use-cases by other reverse-engineered OpenGL drivers like Freedreno, Panfrost / Lima, Etnaviv, and others. It's also possible this could be used as a sorts of testing/fuzzing different shader operations/behavior.

Unigine Superposition 1.1 Adds Linux SteamVR Support, Up To 16K Rendering

It's already been two years since Unigine Corp introduced their very fascinating Superposition graphics benchmark. Today they have rolled out Unigine Superposition 1.1 as the next installment of this demanding GPU benchmark to showcase the Unigine 2 engine's abilities.

While most of you were probably hoping this Unigine benchmark update would bring Vulkan API support, sadly it does not. The Unigine 2 engine doesn't yet support Vulkan but the company is said to still be working on that support to complement OpenGL on Linux systems. Unigine Superposition 1.1 still relies upon OpenGL but with this release now supports up to 16K x 16K rendering.

Broadcom's V3D Gallium3D Driver Nears Working Compute Shader Suppors /jh

Broadcom's next-gen "V3D" driver (formerly known as VC5) being used by some newer Broadcom hardware but more coming down the pipeline in the future has nearly working compute shader support.

We hope the next-gen Raspberry Pi will end up using a Broadcom SoC supporting V3D as besides much better OpenGL capabilities and performance, one of the advantages of V3D -- once the driver stack is in shape -- is compute support -- including ultimately OpenCL and Vulkan, but again more work needs to be done on the software side before that will be realized.

MoltenVK Now Supports Vulkan Tessellation On macOS, Other Features

The crew working on the open-source MoltenVK layer that allows for Vulkan to run on macOS/iOS by remapping the calls to use Apple's Metal drivers just picked up a lot more capabilities.

Headlining the new MoltenVK v1.0.34 release that was issued on Friday is support for tessellation. Vulkan tessellation support can now work on Macs! The new MoltenVK release also adds support for VK_KHR_get_surface_capabilities2 and VK_EXT_host_query_reset. On the extension front is also updated support for VK_KHR_swapchain.