Linux Kernels 4.10.16, 4.9.28 LTS and 4.4.68 LTS Are Out Now with Many Changes

Immediately after announcing earlier today the availability of the first point release of the Linux 4.11 kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman is informing the community about the launch of new maintenance updates to the Linux 4.10, 4.9 and 4.4 kernels.

Linus Torvalds Kicks Off Development of Linux 4.12 with First Release Candidate

Linus Torvalds kicked off the development of the Linux 4.12 kernel series by announcing the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) a day early than expected due to the Mother's Day celebration and last-minute pull requests.

According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.12 RC1 is a pretty large patch that contains numerous additions, including support for AMD's next-generation Radeon RX Vega GPUs, along with a new driver for Intel Atom IPUs (Image Processing Units).

Mesa 17.0.6 Released with AMD Polaris 12 GPU Support for Radeon Vulkan Driver

As expected, the sixth point release to the Mesa 17.0 stable graphics stack was officially unveiled by Andres Gomez, and will soon be available from the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Containing a total of 55 changes, which include both new functionality and fixes for recently discovered bugs, we can say that Mesa 17.0.6 is a hefty maintenance update that all users of the Mesa 17.0 3D Graphics Library series should install, that, of course, if they didn't already upgrade to the newer Mesa 17.1 stable branch.

Kernel prepatch 4.12-rc1

The Many New Features Of The Linux 4.12 Kernel

With the Linux 4.12 merge window now over, here is a look at some of the most exciting features that were added to the Linux kernel for this next installment.

Razer Sabertooth & Mad Catz Brawlstick Support In Linux 4.12

Dmitry Torokhov has sent in some last-minute updates for the Linux 4.12 kernel around its input support.

In particular, this final pull request is primarily an xpad input driver update. This xpad driver update adds in USB IDs for the Mad Catz Brawlstick and Razer Sabertooth.

Freedreno Gallium3D Gets Hardware Binning For A5xx

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics has another important performance feature.

Hardware binning is now supported by the latest-generation A5xx hardware on Freedreno. Hardware binning can boost performance, when it was added for older hardware on Freedreno developer Rob Clark mentioned performance boosts of 35~45% for vertex-heavy workloads.

Mesa 17.0.6 Released With Polaris 12 RADV Support

For those that haven't yet switched over to the newly-stable Mesa 17.1 series, last quarter's Mesa 17.0 series was just updated with the v17.0.6 point release.

Radeon's ROCm OpenCL Runtime Finally Open-Sourced

AMD has made good on their word to open-source their ROCm OpenCL stack.

AMD hadn't been contributing much to their Clover-based Gallium3D OpenCL stack in quite some time as their focus shifted to their ROCm-based compute stack with plans to eventually open up their OpenCL implementation. That implementation is now available as open-source.

Mesa 17.2 Planned For Release Mid-August

With Mesa 17.1 having been released this week, the release calendar has been updated for Mesa 17.2.

Vulkan 1.0.49 Introduces Two New Extensions

It had been close to one month since the last Vulkan update, which is rare since usually point releases to Vulkan 1.0 ship every week or two. But with the wait comes many bug fixes to the specifications as well as two new specifications.

Vulkan 1.0.49 contains a number of document clarifications, new commentary, and in total fixes four GitHub issues and 11 internal issues.

Liquid Cooled AMD Vega Dual-GPU Found In Linux Drivers Coding

We recently found AMD Vega 10 as well as Polaris 12 code in Linux drivers and now we have found hints of AMD Vega dual-GPU graphics cards in the drivers as well. We have been following leaks regarding AMD Vega for some time now and although it was speculated that there would indeed be a liquid cooled version, we did not see an AMD Vega dual-GPU in the works and this is surprising.

Radeon Linux Driver Shows Possible LCS based Dual GPU VEGA

It is not the first time that a set of Linux drivers reveal a thing or two about unannounced products. In the latest leak they now indicate the existence of a liquid cooled Vega, which we already knew but also a dual-GPU version.

There’s a number of things that come to mind though, AMD might be pursuing a new Radeon Pro based dual-GPU product, but the existence of these entries in the drivers are interesting.

Marek submits patch series for threaded Gallium to Mesa, boosts performance in games

AMD employee and Mesa developer Marek Olšák is at it again, proposing a series of patches that would boost performance for AMD GPUs running the open drivers.

Westfield - Wayland HTML5 Browser IPC

I had this lying around for some time but realized I never really announced it on the ML, so here it is!

Westfield: Wayland For HTML5/JavaScript

Westfield is a new independent project that provides a Wayland protocol XML parser and generator for JavaScript.

Developer Erik De Rijcke announced Westfield as a "nearly fully compatible on the wire with the existing libwayland implementation", but libwayland is for C while Westfield is for JavaScript on client-side and Java server-side. Communication with Westfield is done using WebSockets.

Data Science Orgs Form GPU Initiative for Data Analytics

Data Science And Deep Learning Application Leaders Form GPU Open Analytics Initiative

MapD Open Sources GPU-Powered Database

GOAI Publishes Python Data Frame for GPU Analytics

NVIDIA Introduces Open-Source, Voxel-Based SDK to Accelerate GPU Applications

The 2017 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (NVIDIA GTC) kicked off May 8 with a talk by Rama Hoetzlein, NVIDIA lead architect for GVDB Voxels. NVIDIA GDVB Voxels is a new open-source software development kit for generic representation, computation, and rendering of voxel-based data.