• AMDGPU Linux Kernel Driver Gets Patches For Vega M Support - Intel Kabylake G

  Earlier this month Vega M support came to RadeonSI OpenGL, with Vega M being the Radeon graphics found within Intel's Kabylake G processors. There was then Vega M support for the RADV Vulkan driver but these user-space drivers won't work without the kernel bits and now there is that support with 32 AMDGPU DRM patches.

  Alex Deucher of AMD last night mailed out the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver patches for supporting accelerated graphics on Vega M / Kabylake G. These patches are fairly straight-forward and mostly involve support for loading new firmware files for "VegaM" and then mostly taking the driver's existing Polaris code-paths. Yes, the GPU for Intel is advertised as being part of the "Vega" family, but from the RadeonSI/RADV/AMDGPU driver patches, the indications are that it's really more in common with Polaris at least from the driver perspective.

• NVIDIA 396.18.05 Linux Vulkan Driver Released With Fixes

  Just a week after the NVIDIA 396.18.02 Linux driver beta is an updated Linux driver build (and for Windows too).

• X.Org Server 1.20 Git Corrects DRI3 Fallout For Non-Modesetting DDX Drivers

  With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today.

• Jim Keller Reportedly Joins Intel After AMD, Tesla Stint

  Legendary CPU designer Jim Keller has reportedly joined Intel following his brief stint at Tesla after leading the Zen team at AMD.

With last week's initial launch-day Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X some found the Linux performance to be lower than Windows. While the root cause is undetermined, a BIOS/AGESA update does appear to help the Linux performance significantly at least with the motherboard where I've been doing most of my tests with the Ryzen 7 2700X. Here are the latest benchmark numbers.

• BUS1 Still Remains Out Of The Mainline Linux Kernel, But DBus-Broker Continues

  The BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism born out of the ashes of KDBUS still hasn't been mainlined in the Linux kernel, but its code is still improved upon from time to time. At least though DBus-Broker as a new performance-oriented D-Bus implementation continues gaining ground in user-space.

  DBus-Broker was announced last year as a new message bus implementation of D-Bus focused on high performance and reliability while continuing to offer compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation.

• Linux 4.17-rc2 Kernel Released With Mostly Routine Changes

  Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the second weekly test release for what is becoming the Linux 4.17 kernel.

• Wayland's Weston Gets Optimizations For Its Pixman Renderer

  Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations.

  Fabien Lahoudere of Collabora posted a set of patches today to optimize the Pixman renderer for Weston. In particular, there are optimizations around compositing damage to the screen as well as optimizing the shadow buffer usage. The Weston Pixman renderer is often used as a software accelerated fallback in cases where no GPU hardware acceleration may be available. As implied by the name, it uses the long-standing Pixman library that is also used by Cairo, the X.Org Server, etc, for pixel manipulation on the CPU.

• Panfrost Gallium3D Driver For ARM Mali Can Now Render A Cube

  The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D.

• Intel 2018Q1 Graphics Stack Recipe

  Last week Intel's Open-Source Technology Center released their latest quarterly "graphics stack recipe" for the Linux desktop.

  The Intel Graphics Stack Recipe is the company's recommended configuration for an optimal and supported open-source graphics driver experience for their Intel HD/UHD/Iris Graphics found on Intel processors.

• Mesa 18.1-RC1 Released With The Latest Open-Source 3D Driver Features

  Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued.

  While the Mesa website hasn't yet been updated for the 18.1 details, Dylan Baker appears to be the release manager for the 18.1 series -- the second quarter of 2018 release stream.