• Intel Preparing A Final Batch Of Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 4.20~5.0

  Intel open-source developers have already sent in multiple pull requests of feature work to DRM-Next that in turn will be pulled into the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel merge window and they have one final batch of feature changes on the way.

  The cut-off is quickly approaching for new feature work slated for this next kernel cycle (Linux 4.20, or renamed to Linux 5.0 if Linus Torvalds sticks to his usual versioning preference) and Intel has announced a batch of changes ready for testing ahead of issuing it as a pull request to DRM-Next.

• NVIDIA Sends Out DRM Display Patches For Tegra's Xavier SoC

  Going back to the beginning of the year NVIDIA developers have been contributing "Tegra194" enablement to the upstream Linux kernel. They've now moved on to contributing T194 support to the Tegra Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for display support on this SoC that's better known as Xavier.

  The Tegra194 / Xavier is NVIDIA's latest SoC with the eight Carmel ARMv8 cores and Volta-based GPU. The NVIDIA Xavier Developer Kits have begun shipping and now with all of the other necessary hardware enablement bits upstream or on their way to mainline, the latest patches being published are for the display support with the Tegra DRM driver.

• More Linux Tests & Driver Observations With The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

  Here are some additional notes to complement my GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux review from yesterday now that I've had more time with this card and a working Linux driver.

• Mesa 18.2.1 Is Coming This Week With Dozens Of Fixes

  As the first stable point release to the newly-christened Mesa 18.2, the Mesa 18.2.1 release is going to be a big one.

  The release candidate to Mesa 18.2.1 was issued on Wednesday and has nearly 60 patches over the recent 18.2.0 stable release. This includes Vulkan header updates for v1.1.84 and many RADV / ANV Vulkan driver fixes ranging from CTS issues to hangs to other fixes.

• Mesa 18.2.1 Released With A Number Of Fixes For The Vulkan Drivers

  Mesa 18.2.1 is out this morning as the first stable point release to the recently introduced Mesa 18.2 series. Mesa 18.2.1 marks the point at which it should be relatively safe for stable-minded users to switch over to this quarterly release stream.

  Given it's the first point release after a very active development cycle, there are a lot of fixes: around five dozen changes are making up today's release coming two weeks after v18.2.0.

• AMD Adds A Seemingly New Polaris ID To Their Linux Driver

  It looks like another re-branded AMD Polaris graphics card might be on the way given the latest AMDGPU Linux kernel patch.

  Either there's a new AMD Radeon "Polaris" graphics card coming, some new modem for OEMs, or just very tardy maintenance in adding the necessary PCI ID for an existing Polaris graphics card revision... But two years after Polaris RX 400 cards first debuted (and a year and a half since the RX 500 series), there is now a new Polaris PCI ID being added to the AMD Linux graphics driver.

Besides the new GeForce RTX 2080 series being attractive for developers wanting to make use of new technologies like RTX/ray-tracing, mesh shaders, and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), CUDA and OpenCL benchmarking so far on the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is yielding impressive performance -- even outside of the obvious AI / deep learning potential workloads with the Turing tensor cores. Here are some benchmarks looking at the OpenCL/CUDA performance on the high-end Maxwell, Pascal, and Turing cards as well as an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 for reference. System power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar metrics also round out this latest Ubuntu Linux GPU compute comparison.

• Nouveau Developers Begin Reverse-Engineering NVIDIA Turing Driver Support

  The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards are only officially beginning to ship today, but at least one independent Nouveau developer already has his hands on the hardware and beginning to work on the clean-room, driver reverse-engineering process in order to eventually get open-source "Nouveau" driver support working.

• NVIDIA CUDA 10 Officially Released With Turing Support, nvJPEG, CUDA-Vulkan

  Coinciding with the debut of the GeForce RTX 2080 series line-up is now the official release of CUDA 10.0.

  CUDA 10.0.130 is now official after being announced back at SIGGRAPH. This NVIDIA compute architecture update provides Turing GPU support and its Tensor Cores, NVSwitch Fabric support, nvJPEG as a new library for JPEG processing, various performance tuning for its expansive library set, a new async task-graph programming model, interoperability improvements with Vulkan and D3D12, and new developer tools.

• NVIDIA have released the 410.57 driver as well as a 396.54.06 Vulkan beta driver to help DXVK

  Along with the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 GPU series NVIDIA have put out a new 410.57 driver to support it. Additionally, there's a new Vulkan beta driver which should help DXVK.

• Help Test Intel+Nvidia Hybrid Graphics GDM3 Fixes In Ubuntu 18.04

  Ubuntu 18.04 shipped with two issues for Intel+Nvidia hybrid graphics users: an increase in power consumption when the discrete GPU is off, and the inability to switch between power profiles with a simple logout (a restart is currently required).

  These issues are caused by changes in logind, Nvidia drivers packaging (which is now more granular), and the migration from LightDM to GDM3, and they were fixed in Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish.

• NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Adds New KHR_driver_properties & KHR_shader_atomic_int64

  Not to be confused with the new NVIDIA Linux/Windows drivers that should be out today for RTX 2070/2080 "Turing" support and also initial RTX ray-tracing support, there is also out a new Vulkan beta driver this morning.

  The NVIDIA 396.54.06 driver is this new Vulkan beta and as implied by the version number is still on the current stable branch and not in the Turing era. But this driver release is quite exciting as it does bring support for two new extensions... These extensions are very fresh and not yet in the official Vulkan specification: VK_KHR_driver_properties and VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64.

• GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux Benchmarks Coming Today, NVIDIA Driver Bringing Vulkan RTX

  NVIDIA's review/performance embargo has now lifted on the GeForce RTX 2080 series ahead of the cards shipping tomorrow. I should have out initial Linux benchmarks later today, assuming Linux driver availability.

  As wrote about yesterday, just yesterday I ended up receiving the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for Linux benchmarking. But, unfortunately, no Linux driver yet... But I am told it will be posted publicly soon with the Windows driver. Assuming that happens within the hours ahead, I'll still have initial RTX 2080 Ti benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux out by today's end -- thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and recently wrapping up other NVIDIA/AMD GPU comparison tests on the current drivers.

• Intel's New Iris Gallium3D Driver Picks Up Experimental Icelake Bits, GL Features

  One of the talks we are most interested in at XDC2018 is on the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver we discovered last month was in development.

  We stumbled across the Iris Gallium3D driver that's been in development for months as a potential replacement to their "i965" classic Mesa driver. But they haven't really detailed their intentions in full, but we should learn more next week. This is particularly exciting the prospects of an official Intel Gallium3D driver as the company is also expected to introduce their discrete GPUs beginning in 2020 and this new driver could be part of that plan.