Phoronix

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...

From new hardware releases to figuring out that Linux 5.9 performance regression to interesting open-source software advancements, September was an interesting trek with 259 original articles on the site and another 15 featured articles / multi-page Linux hardware reviews...

Following yesterday's release of the finalized OpenCL 3.0 specification, open-source Intel developers have released OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0...

In addition to the last minute AMDGPU fixes for Linux 5.9 that include work on the RDNA2 new GPU support and promoting Navi 12 out of the experimental status, an initial batch of fixes for AMDGPU were also sent in to DRM-Next on Wednesday in addressing early fallout from the new feature code slated for Linux 5.10...

One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release...

GTK4 continues running behind earlier release plans, but GTK 3.99.2 is out today as another development snapshot towards the upcoming GTK 4.0 release...

A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering...

Following last week's news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT "Warp" update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux.