• ROCm 1.8.2 Released For The Open-Source Radeon Linux Compute Stack

  While waiting for the big ROCm 1.9 update, another point release to the ROCm 1.8 series is available for this Radeon Open Compute stack.

  Earlier this month the AMD developers working on this Linux open-source OpenCL/compute stack pushed out the ROCm 1.8.2 beta while today it was elevated to the stable channel.

  Details on the ROCm 1.8.2 update are unfortunately light, but based upon user reports, it seems to be able to create a working environment on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS if paired with a newer kernel. But the official Ubuntu 18.04 LTS isn't coming until ROCm 1.9.

• Raven Ridge APUs Get Minor Performance Boost With Latest RADV Vulkan Driver

  The Raven Ridge Linux support continues to maturing. The latest on these Zen+Vega APUs using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack should be slightly better performance when using the RADV Vulkan driver.

  RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen landed a number of commits on Wednesday to further enhance this Mesa-based Radeon Vulkan driver. With this latest work, he's now enabled binning and DFSM by default for Raven Ridge hardware. With this being enabled now for Raven, he's found a minor performance in the range of 2~3% for some demos and games tested.

• Freedreno Gallium3D Now Exposes Adreno A5xx Performance Counters

  It's been a while since last having any news to report on Freedrenon, the open-source, community-driven Gallium3D driver for providing accelerated 3D support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware. But ahead of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 feature freeze, Freedreno founder Rob Clark has been landing a number of improvements.

• Sway 1.0 Alpha 4 Released With Real-Time Video Capture, Atomic Layout Updates

  Learn more about the Sway 1.0 Alpha 4 release via the GitHub release announcement.

• PDS 0.98s release

  PDS 0.98s is released with the following changes

  1. Fix compilation issue on raspberry pi.
  2. Minor rework and optimization on balance code path.
  3. Fix wrong nr_max_tries in migrate_pending_tasks.

  This is mainly a bug fix and minor optimization release for 4.17. The rework of balance code doesn't go well, it actually make more overhead than current implement. Another rework which based on current implement is still on going, hopefully be included in next release.

• PDS-MQ CPU Scheduler Revised For The Linux 4.17 Kernel With Minor Optimizations

  Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes.

  The PDS scheduler stands for the "Priority and Deadline based Skiplist multiple queue scheduler" that is derived from Con Kolivas' former BFS scheduler with Variable Run Queue (VRQ) support. PDS design principles are to be a simple CPU process scheduler yet efficient and scalable. PDS-mq differs from Con Kolivas' current MuQSS scheduler.

• Add infrastructure for Vblank and page flip events in vkms simulated by hrtimer

  Since the beginning of May 2018, I have been diving into the DRM subsystem. In the beginning, nothing made sense to me, and I had to fight hard to understand how things work. Fortunately, I was not alone, and I had great support from Gustavo Padovan, Daniel Vetter, Haneen Mohammed, and the entire community. Recently, I finally delivered a new feature for VKMS: the infrastructure for Vblank and page flip events.

  At this moment, VKMS have regular Vblank events simulated through hrtimers (see drm-misc-next), which is a feature required by VKMS to mimic real hardware [6]. The development approach was entirely driven by the tests provided by IGT, more specifically the kms_flip. I modified IGT to read a module name via command line and force the use of it, instead of using only the modules defined in the code (patch submitted to IGT, see [1]). With this modification in the IGT, my development process to add a Vblank infrastructure to VKMS had three main steps as Figure 1 describes.

• The State Of The VKMS Driver, Preparations For vBlank & Page Flip Events

  One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it.

• NIR Continues To Be Prepped For OpenCL Support

  Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target.

• Nouveau Gallium3D Moves Closer Towards OpenGL 4.5 Compliance

  While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially.

  This Nouveau Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA "Fermi" graphics hardware and newer has effectively supported all of the OpenGL 4.4/4.5 extensions, but not officially. Originally the NVC0 problem for OpenGL 4.4 and newer was the requirement of passing the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (CTS), which at first wasn't open-source. But now The Khronos Group has made it available to everyone as open-source. Additionally, the proper legal wrangling is in place so the Nouveau driver could become a conforming Khronos adopter under the X.Org Foundation without any associated costs/fees with Nouveau being purely open-source and primarily considered a community driver.

It has been a while since last publishing some Linux GPU driver benchmarks focused explicitly on the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance, but that changed today with a fresh look at the performance between these two Khronos graphics APIs when tested with AMD and NVIDIA hardware on the latest RadeonSI/RADV and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers.

• Libinput Gets Reworked Trackpoint Acceleration

  Peter Hutterer at Red Hat is trying again to get trackpoint acceleration performing nicely under the libinput library so trackpoints behave nicely across Wayland, X.Org, and Mir systems.

  Hutterer believes now that libinput's previous trackpoint acceleration code was "simply broken", but he believes this new code is on the right track and supports a wider configuration range.

• libinput has a new trackpoint acceleration

  Just a heads-up, I just merged a branch that fixes trackpoint acceleration
  in libinput. The previous approach was simply broken, the new one is quite
  similar to what we had before anyway - calculating speed from the deltas and
  applying the acceleration curve from that. The curve is adjusted for
  trackpoints with a relatively wide configurable range.

• Mir 0.32.1 Released With Launcher For Internal Wayland Clients, Fixes

  Canonical developers working on Mir have prepared the release of Mir 0.32.1 with a few fixes and improvements off the recent release of Mir 0.32.

  The Mir abstraction library (libmiral) now has a launcher for internal Wayland clients and the MirAL shell has reinstated the "spinner" in Wayland for when starting the shell. There are also several bug fixes pertaining to Mir's Wayland and Mesa support in this point release.

• Wayland 1.16 & Weston 5.0 Reach Alpha

  Samsung's Derek Foreman has announced the alpha release of Wayland 1.16 as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor.

  As is often the case with recent Wayland releases, they are not all that large. Wayland 1.16 Alpha does away with the deprecated wl_global definition, fixes various oddities, the Wayland code generator now supports foreign enums, and updated contribution documentation.

• mesa 18.1.4

  Hi list,

  Mesa 18.1.4 is now available for download.

  In this release we have:
  - Several fixes for i965
  - Several fixes for anv
  - A few fixes each for radeonsi, glx, the glsl compiler, the autotools build,
  nir, st/dri, and r600

  Dylan

• Mesa 18.1.4 Released With Fixes For Intel & Radeon Drivers

  For those abiding by Mesa stable releases, Mesa 18.1.4 is now available -- in time for updating prior to any weekend Linux gaming or other activities -- for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver components.

  Mesa 18.1.4 truth be told isn't all that of an exciting release, unless you happened to be affected by any of the just over two dozen fixes incorporated into this timed point release.