Phoronix

Announced just over one month ago to the day was the AMD Instinct MI100 and as part of that the ROCM 4.0 software stack. ROCm 4.0 didn't end up actually shipping then but today its sources were uploaded and release builds made available...

There has been some early success geting Ubuntu up and running on Apple's M1 ARM hardware with using the Apple Hypervisor Framework but it looks like a much better experience is on the way with the forthcoming Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon...

AMD noted that EPYC Milan "Zen 3" server processors would be shipping to select customers this quarter ahead of the formal launch in Q1. That's accurate with at least one enterprise now making public inquiries over Linux kernel versions for the EPYC 7003 series. The recent Linux 5.10 kernel debut being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release is coming just in time for those users...

The third weekly release candidate of Wine 6.0 ahead of the stable release expected in January...

With no new X.Org Server releases on the horizon but Red Hat / Fedora wanting to ship updated XWayland support that is developed as part of the X.Org Server code-base, Red Hat engineers are now stepping up to carry out such XWayland-only releases derived from the same source tree but stripping out the code not relevant to XWayland support...

In recent years Red Hat engineers have been contributing to WebRTC in Chromium and related projects as part of Wayland screen sharing support that also works with the likes of PipeWire and XDG-Desktop-Portal. Looking forward to 2021, more WebRTC improvements in Chromium/Chrome are on the way...

The OpenRISC and RISC-V processor architecture updates have both been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window...

Following last week's release of Qt 6.0, The Qt Company has now released Qt Creator 4.14 and Qt Design Studio 2.0 as accompanying assets...

The ACPI / power management and thermal pull requests were all sent out and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 5.11 development...

It's been seven years since Intel last provided a stable release of their "xf86-video-intel" X.Org driver and nearly six years to the day since they even provided their last development snapshot of what was to be xf86-video-intel 3.0. But there still are the occasional commits to this Intel DDX driver such as this week enabling the "TearFree" functionality by default...

Kent Overstreet who developed the Bcachefs file-system out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has sent out the latest patches for review and to also serve as a possible pull request for mainlining the code...

For the past several months we've seen Intel Key Locker support being worked on for Linux as a new feature coming to future processors for better securing AES keys. That initial Key Locker support was initially focused on the open-source compilers with the new instructions while now the Linux kernel patches have been published in preliminary form...

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel...

The Linux 5.11 merge window continues being very active this week with Linus Torvalds hoping kernel maintainers will get in all of their new feature code well before Christmas...

At the start of the month AMD released AOCC 2.3 as the newest version of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler. AOCC is one of several LLVM/Clang downstream versions maintained by the company with this one being about delivering flagship AMD Zen family compiler support. From an AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" series processor I recently wrapped up fresh benchmarks of AOCC 2.3 against the current GCC 10 and Clang 11 compiler releases.

As part of the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman is the USB subsystem. The USB (and Thunderbolt) updates are now in mainline as part of the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window...

A new feature release of POCL is now available that is the "Portable Computing Language" offering OpenCL execution atop CPUs and other devices like NVIDIA CUDA that have an LLVM back-end...

The latest hardware enablement around Intel's Alder Lake for the Linux kernel is audio support...

The ARM64 architecture updates were sent in already for Linux 5.11 along with the various ARM SoC additions, DeviceTree additions for new hardware support, and similar changes. There is a lot of new hardware support as always being brought up by the mainline kernel...

Wayland 1.18 came back in February while until now there wasn't much talk about a "Wayland 1.19" since at this stage the core functionality of Wayland is quite mature and stable. But now work is underway on Wayland 1.19 with aims to likely ship it in January...