X11 Library Sees Lots of Fixes with LibX11 1.7 Release

Out this weekend is Phoronix Test Suite 10.2-Harstad Milestone 1 as the first development snapshot of this next quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software.Within Intel's vast open-source software ecosystem and much of the attention being on oneAPI as their preferred programming model for developers these days and there being multiple different open-source Intel graphics compiler back-ends, one that is often forgotten about is the Intel C for Metal Compiler that on Friday saw a new release.In addition to squaring away the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA 2 support and promoting the Arcturus support for the new GPU found within the AMD MI100 accelerator, this month AMD open-source Linux driver developers have been devoting a fair amount of work towards power optimizations.Ahead of the holidays the KDE development work is as busy as ever from Plasma 5.21 to its large desktop application set.Google engineers have sent out their latest patches for allowing the mainline Linux kernel to be built with LLVM Clang link-time optimizations (LTO) for greater performance and possibly size benefits.It's been seven years since the release of libX11 1.6.0 for this central X11 library while on Friday was replaced by the libX11 1.7 series. Linux support for the Intel Maple Ridge controller is now on the way.The last piece of the puzzle to the open-source AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT driver support is now upstream in its respective location.While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q4.4 was released, AMD has made good on their word to provide punctual AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver support for their new RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards and that has resulted in a new AMDVLK release.Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server.The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software.In addition to AMD and Xilinx bringing ROCm to FPGAs, another interesting open-source/Linux milestone for the company being acquired by AMD is their publishing of the AI Engine open-source kernel driver with ambitions for upstreaming it.Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits.Now here is some darn interesting software news from SC20...