Phoronix

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with some interesting new additions, primarily around user interrupts and the enhanced hardware feedback interface...

KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing...

The first release candidate of TVM 0.7, the Apache incubator project providing a deep learning compiler stack, is now available...

XCP-ng as the open-source hypervisor built atop XenServer is preparing for its 8.2 LTS release while this week marked the availability of the first beta...

Intel engineers today sent out their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the company's forthcoming hybrid architecture processors...

AMD has been sending out a lot of new Linux graphics driver enablement code recently for the Linux with the newest being the "Green Sardine" platform...

Given that Ubuntu 20.10 will be shipping with Linux 5.8 out-of-the-box along with other autumn 2020 Linux distributions where Linux 5.9 is landing too late, here is a fresh comparison of several different AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" and Intel Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors on this current stable kernel release for seeing how the performance is standing up as we approach this next round of Linux distribution releases.

Following the announcement this summer of Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) as an exciting feature coming to Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs next year, Intel's open-source engineers quickly began with patches to LLVM and GNU toolchain support for AMX. Now Intel engineers have sent out their patches in preparing the Linux kernel for AMX...

A proposal is being discussed over the possibility of beginning to make use of the Rust programming language within Mesa 3D for this open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver stack along with the likes of Gallium3D video acceleration...

While the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver's "ACO" back-end was developed and funded by Valve with gaming in mind to optimize game load times and help with delivering optimal performance, it turns out ACO works damn well for some Vulkan compute workloads too...

For a while now there have been references to "Vivaldi" as a new Chromebook keyboard firmware for future devices. References in Chromium OS repositories have pointed to expanded keyboard layouts and other new features with Vivaldi. Coming with the Linux 5.10 kernel is now a new HID driver for supporting some of the differences with Vivaldi...

Valve has updated their monthly Steam Hardware/Software Survey statistics for September and they indicate the closest we've seen in a while for Steam on Linux closing back in on the 1.0% threshold...

The Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" beta is now available for testing of Ubuntu Desktop / Cloud / Server products as well as derivatives like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu...

The third release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms...

The first release candidate of the big PHP 8.0 is now available for testing...

Linux 5.10 is set to bring a major rework to the Spectre mitigation handling for the 64-bit ARM architecture...

It's always great starting off a new month seeing new work on low-level kernel optimizations...

When Intel announced 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" last month it wasn't clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month...

Mesa's Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3...

While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs...