Graphics: Mesa 18.2.3, AMDVLK and Intel KVMGT

• mesa 18.2.3

  Mesa 18.2.3 is now available. In this release we have: Different patches for the DirectX9 and DRI state trackers. Several fixes and workarounds for different games, inlcuding RAGE, Yakuza and The Evil Within, Wolfenstein The Old Blood ARMA 3, or No Mans Sky. A bunch of fixes for different drivers, including r600, nouveau, radeonsi, anv, radv, virgl, i965, nvc0 or nv50. Worth to mention a fix for GPU hangs in Radeonsi. State Trackers also get different fixes and corrections. Finally, fixes for GLSL and NIR are also in this queue.

• Mesa 18.2.3 Released With Latest Driver Workarounds For Steam Play / Proton

  Mesa 18.2.3 is out today as the latest point release to the Mesa 18.2 stable series. Notable to this point release are several bug fixes and workarounds to benefit Steam Play / Wine (and the Valve downstream Proton) and various new games being brought up there thanks in part to DXVK. The games with workarounds in Mesa 18.2.3 are Rage, Yakuza, The Evil Within, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, ARMA 3, and No Man's Sky. These workarounds are added to the common Mesa DRIRC for toggling certain features as opposed to driver-specific hacks.

• AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Driver Updated With A Slew Of Additions

  It had been more than two weeks since the last time AMD developers updated their public source trees making up the official AMDVLK Vulkan driver but fortunately that has now changed. Given the time since the last commit, there is a lot of goodies with this new AMDVLK driver refresh.

• Intel KVMGT 2018-Q3 Released As Their Latest Open-Source GPU Virtualization Bits

  Intel developers today announced the release of KVMGT 2018-Q3 (also known as Intel GVT-g for KVM) as well as the accompany Xen hypervisor tailored XenGT 2018-Q3 update. These are the latest quarterly updates to the Intel technology stack for allowing GPU virtualization of their HD/UHD/Iris Graphics hardware with mediated pass-through on Linux systems. This GPU virtualization support continues working with Intel 5th Gen Core/Xeon "Broadwell" processors and newer with guest operating systems being Linux as well as Windows 7 or newer.

Some Initial PostgreSQL 11.0 Database Benchmarks

Among other software releases, yesterday brought the debut of the PostgreSQL 11.0 database server. Given it has possible performance enhancements and the new (non-default) LLVM-based just-in-time compilation ability, I decided to run some benchmarks on the powerful Dell PowerEdge EPYC 2P server. PostgreSQL 11.0 is a big update for this popular database server. Those unfamiliar with its changes can find the details via the release notes. Details on the LLVM JIT back-end can be found via the in-tree documentation. The just-in-time compilation support didn't get enabled by default with PostgreSQL 11.0 due to open performance issues, but can be manually enabled for those wishing to run experiments or happen to be running a lot of complex queries where the JIT capability is likely to pay off.

Hacker friendly LapPi laptop kit runs on Raspberry Pi 3B+

SB Components is Kickstartering a Raspberry Pi based “LapPi” laptop kit with 7- or 5-inch screens, keyboard, camera, speakers, and 3800mAh battery, starting at $220 with an RPi 3B+ or $178 without. SB Components has successfully funded its DIY LapPi kit on Kickstarter, and packages are available through Nov. 10 with December delivery. The company is known for its PiTalk smartphone and other Raspberry Pi add-on kits, which are available as options.

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