Phoronix

As part of the virtual SIGGRAPH20, Intel is using the opportunity to talk up their ray-tracing efforts...

Proposed last summer by Valve and Collabora developers were extending the Linux kernel's futex system call to allow for more optimal thread pool synchronization and paired with Wine/Proton work to better match the semantics of Windows. That then spun into creating a new system call, futex2. With the recently closed Linux 5.9 merge window the new futex2 system call didn't land, but the work is still being pursued...

For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default...

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders...

The hipSYCL effort has been about supporting the Khronos SYCL single-source language built on C++ across any CPU with OpenMP as well as AMD Radeon GPUs via ROCm and NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA. The hipSYCL effort has a new "Lite" experimental runtime under development...

One of many performance optimization projects being pursued by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt in the GNOME space has been working to lower the latency when using NVIDIA's proprietary driver to address high latency spikes in certain situations as well as stuttering on the desktop. The Ubuntu developer has had patches under testing for months while this past week a latest revision was made available...

The "first real user" of the BPF user mode driver facility is on the way for Linux 5.10...

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has been working on "GLX Delay" as a means of offering accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The proposed code is going through Mesa even though it's for the proprietary NVIDIA driver benefit and also requires a change to the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd)...

It's been one week already since feature work ended on Linux 5.9 and that means it's time for the 5.9-rc2 kernel. Like clockwork, Linux Torvalds has shipped Linux 5.9-rc2 with the initial batch of bug/regression fixes as well as some late changes for the cycle...

Cachy is a Linux CPU scheduler that has been generating some attention over the past month that aims for optimal CPU cache usage and based on a Highest Response Ration Next (HRRN) policy...

We previously reported on F2FS "ATGC" functionality for increasing the garbage collection efficiency for the Flash-Friendly File-System. Those patches are now queued up in F2FS' "dev" branch meaning we could see the functionality in place for Linux 5.10...

The virtual DebConf 20 is happening now through 29 August. Due to COVID-19, the annual Debian Conference is happening exclusively as a virtual event for those wanting to watch a number of interesting Debian/Linux/FLOSS-related talks...

Back in April the folks at Micron announced the "HSE" open-source storage engine optimized for SSDs and persistent memory. Version 1.8 of HSE was released on Friday as the first major update since going public earlier this year...

For a while now a Mozilla software project that's been an "unsung hero" has been DeepSpeech as their speech-to-text engine. Sadly, following the recent major layoffs at Mozilla and restructuring along with a shift to focusing more on their profitable activities, DeepSpeech for now has an uncertain future...

One of the early changes queued in the USB area for the Linux 5.10 cycle later this summer is a "reset-raspberrypi" driver set for introduction as another upstream improvement for the current-generation Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer...

Unity Tech is the latest high profile company joining the Blender Development Fund for assisting this leading open-source 3D modeling software...

Adding to the list of software projects embracing Zstd for its very efficient compression abilities, OpenZFS is now supporting the Facebook-developed Zstandard as its latest file-system compression support...

Last year Wine itself added emulation for some CPU instructions now blocked by UMIP, the User-Mode Instruction Prevention functionality found in the latest Intel and AMD processors. Now slated for Linux 5.10 is the emulation/spoofing of two of those instructions by the kernel as another attempt to help a small number of Windows programs relying on those instructions...

KDE applications finally have the ability to keeping their window positions preserved when closed and then re-launched...

With all the Linux 5.9 kernel changes you may have noticed no major EXT4 file-system pull request was submitted during the kernel merge window the prior two weeks. Fortunately, the EXT4 work has now been sent out and Linus Torvalds honored the late changes for this widely-used Linux file-system...