Phoronix

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19 on schedule this morning...

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs...

Merged back in Linux 5.7 was the new exFAT file-system driver backed by Samsung and replacing the prior "staging" exFAT driver that had been around for the prior few kernel releases. Samsung has now sent their queued up exFAT improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code...

Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance...

With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round...

Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichlid" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichlid. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.

On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window...

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics driver developer Chris Wilson on Sunday sent out a big patch series that introduces a new fair low-latency scheduler for the Intel kernel graphics driver...

Last week saw the main Direct Rendering Manager driver updates for Linux 5.8 with a lot on the open-source graphics front while a secondary pull request was submitted today with the Freedreno "MSM" DRM driver changes for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver implementation...

While more laptops are shipping these days finally with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics and Tiger Lake with "Gen 12" graphics are expected soon, there still is an incredible amount of hardware out there making use of Intel Gen 9 graphics that have been in use since Skylake. It's looking like for the Ubuntu 20.10 cycle, there is going to be an emphasis on offering better performance for this very common generation of Intel UHD Graphics...

Normally the NTB patches for new kernel cycles aren't particularly noteworthy but this time around for Linux 5.8 is Icelake support...

Consulting firm KDAB has released Kuesa 3D 1.2 as the newest version of their 3D integration workflow open-source software...

It was just over a week ago that Reiser4 was updated for Linux 5.6 support while now it's been updated for the newly-minted Linux 5.7 stable kernel along with updating the experimental Reiser5 file-system for this latest kernel series...

GNOME 3.37.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the quest towards the stable GNOME 3.38 desktop environment this September...

NVIDIA has yet to formally announce the 450 Linux driver series in beta or stable form, but the first pre-release builds in the 450 branch did manage to creep out this past week alongside the CUDA 11.0 release candidate...

Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system...