Linux Kernel and Graphics: Nuphy Air75 Wireless Receiver, Simon Ser on wlroots, Mike Blumenkrantz Back in Zink

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 05, 2023

• Nuphy Air75 Wireless Receiver does not work on Linux

  Any way, there is probably some complicated way to nicely ask the kernel to load hid-apple based on some USB vendor ID or something, but I’m not planning to dig into this further. I am just using it in wired or Bluetooth mode. I’m just writing this down because I couldn’t find anyone even describing the problem on the Interwebs. There are a lot of answers about using fnmode when using wired or Bluetooth. Nobody seems to have asked about the wireless receiver. Another fun tidbit is that all these new wave low-profile mechanical keyboards (Nuphy, Keychron, possibly others) seem to just identify themselves as an Apple Magic Keyboard when in their “Mac” mode.

• Simon Ser: Status update, December 2022

  Following last month’s wlroots release, we’ve started the Sway release candidate cycle. Kenny Levinsen and Ronan Pigott have helped fixing the bugs and regressions that popped up, and I hope we’ll be able to ship the final release next week. I also plan to release wlroots 0.16.1 with the fixes we’ve accumulated.

  In other wlroots news, Manuel Stoeckl and I have continued to work on the Vulkan renderer. A lot more pixel formats are now supported for textures, and the buffer synchronization issues should all be sorted out. Next we’d like to add support for rendering to high bit depth buffers for color management purposes. This is a bit more involved since there is no shader stage which runs after blending, so I’d like to experiment with compute shaders to see if they’re better suited for us. That ties in with the renderer API redesign I’ve been planning for a while: the new rendering API should make it easier to use compute shaders, and already shows a nice perf boost for the Pixman renderer.

  I’ve been debugging some issues with USB-C docks where outputs wouldn’t turn back on after a plug-unplug-replug cycle. The result is an i915 patch which fixes some of issues, but it seems there are more where that came from. Ultimately this class of bugs should get fixed when we add support for atomically turning off multiple outputs at once in wlroots, but this will require a lot more work.

  Alexander Orzechowski and I have been pushing surface-invalidation, a new Wayland protocol to help with GPU resets. GPU resets destroy the whole GL/Vulkan state on the compositor side, so compositors which can recover from resets are left with nothing to draw. The protocol allows compositors to request a new buffer from clients.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Right Out The Gate

  While the blog was on break, some of you might have noticed that VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer was released with my greasy fingerprints on it.

  You might also have noticed that Zink didn’t have a day-one MR.

  The thing about Schrödinger’s Specification is that it only remains constant while you’re directly observing it. As soon as you look away, it becomes an amorphous entity changing in unknown and confusing ways.