This week's Linux news: Mesa announces clear updates for Proton and AMD on RISC-V

It is not always possible to publish all the news in a timely manner, but some events are still worth mentioning. In this summary, the editorial team provides an overview of all the important news from the Linux world from the previous week.

Mesa 24.1 with clear synchronization

With the release of Mesa 24.1, Explicit Sync will be available for all Vulkan drivers under Wayland and X11. When rendering, the CPU sends batch “tasks” to the GPU. However, since these are not independent but depend on interactions such as write commands from the CPU, synchronization is necessary. With the “implicit synchronization” used previously, the application issuing the rendering task is ignored and does not know the current state. This can lead to errors when used under the increasingly widespread Wayland protocol. Using Explicit Sync, the application can influence the process.

Another important innovation in the new Mesa is the development of free Nvidia drivers. Distributions are required to offer the new free driver and give users the opportunity to use it instead of the proprietary driver. The OpenGL driver for Apple devices is also making the leap and supports OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2.

Proton experiment as of May 23, 2024

In the beta branch of the Proton compatibility layer, Valve is quickly releasing bug fixes and new functionality. There were no major changes, but bugs related to the Ubisoft launcher were fixed. In particular, the problem of launching the game when using a new Proton prefix and requesting the serial number when launching Ghost Recon: Future Soldier for the first time. Foundry players can enjoy fixed glitches when hosting multiplayer games. There is now support for D3D12 for OpenXR. In Ghost of Tsushima, the warning that the Nvidia driver used is outdated has been removed. Audio issues in Microsoft Flight Simulator when viewing developer logs have also been resolved.

AMD graphics cards on RISC-V

Linux kernel 6.10 can make it possible to run newer AMD graphics cards on a RISC-V system. Corresponding patches have been submitted and address the current lack of kernel floating point support on RISC-V processors. However, the choice of platforms with PCIe connectivity and processors with free instruction set architecture is still limited, but patches are expanding the capabilities of the free operating system.