Phoronix

Landing in Mesa 20.3 during this final week of feature development is support in RadeonSI Gallium3D for EGL_EXT_protected_surface. This long-standing EGL extension allows surfaces/windows to beset as protected and in which case the contents are only accessible to secure accesses. Outside/insecure accesses to the window (surface) contents are blocked...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.

The third alpha release of Kodi 19 "Matrix" was released on Sunday for this popular multi-platform HTPC software...

The second weekly release candidate to Linux 5.10 is now available for testing...

For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates...

While Linux 5.10-rc2 is coming later today and a week past the merge window, a notable late pull request sent in this morning by Greg Kroah-Hartman is removing the Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture drivers, a.k.a. Xeon Phi...

At the Linux Foundation's KVM Forum 2020 this week, Stefano Garzarella of Red Hat presented on the possibility of speeding up virtual machine I/O performance by sharing the host's IO_uring queues with guests. In doing so the virtual machines have near bare-metal performance with the proposed patches...

Earlier this year the Linux kernel landed split lock detection for being able to detect and optionally kill processes leading to a split lock since it can cause measurable performance issues and even possible unprivileged denial of service...

September marked a decade since the OpenIndiana project was announced for continuing on with the OpenSolaris code-base (and ultimately based on Illumos) in being born out of the justified and proven accurate concerns when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source operating system...

Another month in the books, another month closer to the end of the dreadful 2020. It was at least an eventful October with 268 original news articles and another 21 multi-page featured articles and Linux hardware reviews. The content ranged from the continuous Linux kernel advancements to exciting hardware announcements...

The Wine program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms can run on a number of different architectures, but Wine doesn't handle the emulation of running Windows x86/x64 binaries on other architectures like 64-bit ARM or PowerPC. But that's what the Wine-based Hangover is about with currently allowing those conventional Windows binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) and 64-bit POWER too...

With this month's Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint development news there are two items worth calling attention to...

Laptop vendors recently disclosed "Xe MAX" graphics as discrete Intel graphics set to appear within laptops in the coming weeks. That announcement was a bit unexpected and Intel did not brief the media in advance while today -- in an unusual announcement for a Saturday (Intel says it's timed for system availability, seemingly first in China) -- the company is formally announcing Iris Xe MAX.

This week brought the release of AMD's ROCm 3.9 as their open-source compute stack for Radeon GPUs. With ROCm 3.9 the AOMP work for LLVM/Clang-based compiler with OpenMP offload capabilities to Radeon GPUs was integrated. AOMP though is still advancing independently of the ROCm releases with Friday night marking the release of AOMP 11.11...

The LLVM Clang compiler stack has merged its support for AVX-VNNI, the Vector Neural Network Instructions for AVX to complement the AVX-512 version...

The bug fixing in KDE land continues and ends the month with a "bug massacre", for how KDE developer Nate Graham describes it in his weekly recaps...

It's looking like Paragon Software's "NTFS3" read-write Linux driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system is on a trajectory where we could see it land possibly with the Linux 5.11 kernel kicking off at year's end. Friday marked the eleventh iteration of these patches that Paragon previously offered to commercial customers but is now in the process of being upstreamed...

The Linux 5.11 kernel will bring support for the ASUS "N-Key" keyboard that is used by nearly all of the current ASUS gaming laptops...

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation...

The Linux kernel's frame-buffer console (FBCON) is set to drop accelerated scrolling support since it isn't widely used and now found to be "full of bugs" plaguing the code-base...