Phoronix

Git 2.30 is out today as the latest stable release update of this wildly-popular, distributed revision control system...

It didn't land for Linux 5.11 but it looks like Linux 5.12 could end up supporting Intel's "HDR Backlight Interface" for helping newer Intel laptops with their backlight controls where they don't comply with VESA specifications but rather catering to Intel's proprietary interface...

While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.

With the Linux 5.12 kernel next spring it looks like the Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA 2" overclocking support will be in order...

Bootlin working under contract for an unnamed NAS vendor has been working to update the Large Page Support for 32-bit ARM and ultimately coming up with an upstream-friendly way to be able to support more than 16TB of storage on 32-bit ARM devices...

Of all the new Linux 5.11 features and all the enablement work Intel has already completed for Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" hardware, one big feature not yet mainlined is the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support...

Linus Torvalds as expected released Linux 5.11-rc1 this evening, which marks the end of the two week merge window that went through Christmas...

The Linux 5.11 merge window has been open the past two weeks following the debut of Linux 5.10 but is set to close today. A lot of new features and exciting improvements were merged for Linux 5.11 although it is somewhat of a bumpy ride at the moment but should be buttoned up and ready for its stable release come February.

Intel's open-source oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler saw a Christmas Day update with the 2020-12 monthly update...

Linux 5.11-rc1 is due for release later today and at least one regression has seen a quick resolution...

Back in 2010 was a change to disable run-time power management of PCI devices by default and leaving it up to user-space to in turn override it if desired. Now as we gear up for 2021, some upstream kernel developers are wondering about that original decision and possibly changing the default behavior to yield better out-of-the-box power savings with modern systems...

The HAMMER2 file-system that has been used by default on DragonFlyBSD for some time has lacked multi-volumes support compared to its former HAMMER1 file-system. But as of this weekend in the latest Git development code, HAMMER2 now has initial support for multiple volumes...

While being released one day late due to Christmas, Wine 6.0-RC4 is out. This is the latest weekly test candidate of the forthcoming Wine 6.0 as the annual stable release due out in January for this leading software to run Windows programs/games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs...

Linux 5.10.3 is out today as a post-Christmas stable release update...

Even with Christmas week there has been a lot of improvements still happening in the KDE world...

One of the pleasant kernel surprises in 2020 was Paragon Software looking to upstream their previously commercial NTFS driver. This driver offers read-write support and more advanced capabilities than the current read-focused NTFS driver presently in the mainline kernel and better off than the other FUSE-based driver. This driver hasn't been mainlined yet but Paragon published new patches on Christmas...

LibreOffice has various "AVMedia" back-ends for supporting the playback of audio and video within the open-source office suite with GStreamer and other platform-specific options. LibreOffice also supported a VLC back-end for audio/video playback but after years of that code being experimental and not maintained, it's now been eliminated...

Adding to the open-source Christmas excitement this year was the release of GIMP 2.99.4 that puts this image editor one step closer to the long-awaited GIMP 3.0...

After a half-decade working toward it, Ruby 3.0 was released on Christmas Day with much greater performance and other features for this high-level general purpose programming language...

It's not the Grinch in 2020 that stole Christmas, but the Schedutil CPU frequency scaling governor on the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel that is thrashing performance for AMD Zen 2 and newer. Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro are beginning to use CPUFreq Schedutil by default on newer kernels and thus leading to a very bad initial/out-of-the-box experience with the current behavior on the early Linux 5.11 code.