Phoronix

The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now available for testing...

GNOME 3.38 is due for release next week while the second and final release candidate is now available as one last chance for testing...

Breaking this weekend is word that NVIDIA and Arm are reportedly close to a deal in which the graphics giant would be acquiring the UK-based chip designer from SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion USD or more...

While FreeBSD 13 is aiming for release around March of 2021, FreeBSD 12.2 is on the way for releasing next month as the next stable installment...

AOMP 11.9 was released on Friday as AMD's LLVM-based compiler with Clang for C/C++ and Flang for Fortran in offloading capable OpenMP code to Radeon GPUs...

The Wasmer 1.0 alpha release is now available for running WebAssembly programs anywhere. Wasmer is about providing a universal runtime for WebAssembly (WASM) that can run across platforms / operating systems and also embed into other programming languages. Wasmer leverages WebAssembly principles to provide safety around untrusted code on top of its other design features...

KDE Frameworks 5.74 is out as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit...

Rebased atop yesterday's Wine 5.17 upstream release, the experimental/testing blend of Wine is out with a new update that comes in at just under 650 patches compared to the official Wine code-base...

Akademy 2020 took place virtually this week as the annual gathering of KDE developers...

Wine 5.17 is out this afternoon as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot in the Wine 5.x series leading up to Wine 6.0 in early 2021...

GameMode 1.6 is out as the Linux daemon developed by game porting firm Feral Interactive for setting the CPU frequency scaling governor and other helpers when launching games in an effort to enhance the Linux gaming performance and then returning the system to its prior state after the game has quit...

As part of re-testing all hardware prior to major GPU/driver launches, here is a look at the latest NVIDIA OpenCL/CUDA performance on Linux -- complementing the recent Blender 2.90 benchmarks and the latest NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux gaming performance. In still waiting to find out when we will get any NVIDIA Ampere hardware for Linux testing, I have been having some benchmarking fun and extended this to a 24-way graphics card comparison back to Maxwell in looking at not only the raw GPU compute performance but also the performance-per-Watt / power consumption and GPU thermal values.

Mesa 20.3 feature development continues progressing nicely...

Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed "BlindSide" as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors...

The Qt Company announced their planned development hosts for Qt 6.0 around continuous integration and the platforms they intend to support for Qt 6.0, some that are no longer set to be supported, and other targets they plan to support later on in future Qt 6.x releases...

The latest Intel oneAPI software release is a new monthly update to their LLVM-based oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compiler...

For the past number of weeks there have been discussions ongoing about the "loss of leadership" within the Ubuntu community and as part of that the Ubuntu Community Team and Ubuntu Community Council having faded away in recent years. Following a lot of comments on the Ubuntu Discourse, Mark Shuttleworth has chimed in with his thoughts and work moving forward...

The Linux 5.0 to 5.9 kernel benchmarking posted this week showed TensorFlow Lite running slower since the Linux 5.5 kernel... On top of looking at the new Linux 5.9 regressions, I also spent some time bisecting and figuring out what happened for TensorFlow Lite last year that has at least for the system under test caused it to run slower for all the kernel releases this year as shown in the aforelinked article.

As work that should come together during the GNOME 3.40 cycle, the power-profiles-daemon project has just tagged its "v0.1" inaugural release as part of the work on better power management handling / power profiles easily configurable from the GNOME desktop...

The latest functionality Microsoft is adding to their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) is support for attaching and mounting physical disks within WSL2...