Status update, December 2020
Hi all! This status update is the 24th one, so it’s been 2 years I’ve started writing those now (ignoring a little hiatus). Time flies!
This month I’ve invested a lot of time into wlroots. My main focus has been renderer v6, which has now been internally rolled out to all backends. I’m now working on moving all of the rendering stuff out of the backends, starting with the cursor handling. This should also help with the work-in-progress explicit synchronization implementation. Apart from these big under-the-hood changes, I’ve also improved the DRM backend, fixing some bugs and simplifying the logic.
As part of my gamescope-related work I’ve contributed to a few upstream projects like amdgpu and radv. I’ve sent a dozen amdgpu patches to improve the atomic commit checks. A bad KMS configuration would previously result in a corrupted result, now amdgpu lets user-space know that the configuration is invalid and user-space can fall back to something else. This greatly helps libliftoff to choose the best possible configuration.
I’ve continued my work on improving docs for DRM in the kernel, and also sent a few patches to check drivers provide a sensible set of primary planes. I’m now also a libdrm committer and pushed a few documentation improvements there.
Apart from graphics, other of my projects have received some interesting updates too. Thanks to delthas, the soju IRC bouncer can now be configured to automatically detach a channel when there’s no activity, and to automatically re-attach when there’s new activity. This can be used for instance to hide low-traffic channels, or automatically detach from a high-traffic channel if you’re not highlighted for a while. I’ve also rolled out delivery receipts, which allow to avoid loosing messages when a client connection breaks. Various bug fixes have been contributed by Hubert Hirtz. Thanks both of you!
I’ve polished go-msgauth, my Go library for DKIM and other related standards. It’s now used in production on the SourceHut mail servers. Our previous OpenDKIM setup was causing DKIM validation failures because of some various musl-related issues. go-msgauth should fix that.
Last by not least, the first version of the basu D-Bus library has been released. Patches to add basu support to mako and swaybar have been merged. The next big milestone will be FreeBSD support, Kenny Levinsen has gotten as far as making a few tests pass (with some hacks). Soon™!
See you next month!