X.Org Developers Conference 2020

The X.Org Developers Conference 2020 was a virtual free software conference that took place in September, 2020.

Video Recordings

• AMD At The X.Org Developers Conference 2020: No-No Baking Your Graphics Card
  
  
  Linux kernel developer Rajneesh Bhardwaj from AMD's Radeon Open Compute team warned that you should absolutely not bake your graphics card at the X.Org developers conference this week. He explained the dangers and stressed "Don't try this at home!". He went on to detail the many runtime power management advancements the amdgpu kernel driver for AMD graphics cards has seen the last year.
  
• Adriconf
  
  
  sounds like something one might want to enable to get better performance.
  
• How the ACO Mesa Vulkan Shader Compiler For AMD GPUs Came To Be: From Prototype To Default
  
  
  The Vulkan ACO shader compiler for AMD graphics cards on Linux will be the default shader compiler when Mesa 20.2 is released later this month. Developer Timor Kristóf held a 40 minutes long and interesting talk about the development process and the efforts behind making ACO a reality at the The X.Org Developers Conference 2020. Here it is.
  
• Peer To Peer DMA
  
  
  Peer To Peer DMA means sending data directly from one device to another without going through the systems memory or CPU. Sending data directly between devices on the PCIe bus has clear advantages if you can make it work: There is no CPU overhead or need for synchronization. It is very hard to do P2P DMA on Linux.
  
• The Big Plans For wlroots
  
  
  wlroots is a library with everything you need to create a Wayland compositor. It is currently used by the Sway tiling window manager. Developer Simon Ser revealed some pretty big plans for future improvements to the wlroots library at the X.Org developers conference last week. Vulkan rendering is among the items on the to-do list.
  
• The Current State Of Gamescope
  
  
  Gamescope is a bare-bones Wayland compositor that lets you up-scale or otherwise alter games and other graphical applications so they are displayed correctly, or just larger, on modern displays with higher resolutions. It is being developed by Valve-employed Pierre-Loup A Griffais who gave a interesting talk about the current state of Gamescope at the X.Org Developers Conference 2020. Gamescope will currently only work on AMD graphics cards using the RADV Vulkan driver. It can be used under both Xorg/X11 and Wayland.
  
• The Real Risks And Costs Of Using Cloud Services: The Freedesktop.org Inside Scoop
  
  
  Benjamin Tissoires, who works for IBM subsidiary RedHat, shared some interesting and shocking insights into the very real cost of cloud hosting a huge free software community like Freedesktop.org in his presentation "Status of freedesktop.org gitlab/cloud hosting" at the The X.Org Developers Conference 2020. For them, a initially very small monthly cloud hosting bill grew over time and eventually became gigantic. The effect of getting "free" cloud hosting for a period of time were specially interesting: They did not notice that the "sponsored" and temporarily hidden monthly bill was growing rapidly and got a huge wake-up call when monthly bills returned and they turned out to be massive.
  
• Vulkan Will Soon Have A Vendor-Neutral Cross-Platform Ray-Tracing API
  
  
  Two currently provisional Vulkan extensions, VK_KHR_ray_tracing and SPV_KHR_ray_tracing, are on their way to the core Vulkan API. These new Vulkan extensions will let developers write cross-platform device-independent ray-tracing code. The new Vulkan ray-tracing extensions are not yet set in stone but they are close to being finalized. Intel, of all GPU vendors, is leading the charge towards the new Vulkan ray-tracing paradigm. Intel-employed developer Jason Ekstrand gave a long and detailed overview of the upcoming Vulkan Ray-Tracing API at the X.Org Developers Conference 2020 held earlier this week.