Phoronix

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.9 as stable...

Given the impending release of Linux 5.9, I was having some fun with cloc today looking at the current lines of code count for this near-final Linux 5.9 kernel state...

Pitivi 2020.09 is now available (well, actually, was tagged ten days ago but only announced today) as the first release for this GNOME video editor solution since Pitivi 0.999 back in August 2018...

The Linux 5.9 kernel is expected for release this evening which will in turn kick off the Linux 5.10 merge window for the next two weeks. As we've already been closely monitoring the various "-next" development trees in recent weeks of material building up for this next cycle, here is a look at a portion of what's to come for this late 2020 kernel...

While the Linux 5.9 kernel isn't even being released until later today, the ARM64 architectural changes have already been mailed in ahead of the opening of the Linux 5.10 merge window...

Intel engineers continue working on "Protection Keys for Supervisor" support for the Linux kernel as a feature coming to a future generation of processors (presumably Sapphire Rapids). The initial users of this PKS support will be helping to protect persistent memory as well as adding safeguards to Trusted Keys within the Linux kernel...

Seeing new AMDGPU targets added to mainline LLVM for aging Radeon GFX7/GFX8 graphics hardware wasn't what I expected to see this weekend...

Just over one week ago Intel released the Media Driver 2020.3 with Gen12/Xe AV1 decode and other improvements for their quarterly feature release of this open-source video acceleration driver. They have also now released their adjoining Media SDK 20.3 open-source update...

KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21...

It was in January that AMD finally published an open-source Linux driver for their Sensor Fusion Hub used by AMD Ryzen laptops for various sensor functionality. As we approach the end of the year this driver still hasn't been mainlined yet but a new revision was sent out on Friday...

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 20.3 features is now RADV ACO supporting NGG GS. Or rather, the Radeon Vulkan driver with the ACO back-end now supports geometry shaders with Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) as found on newer AMD GPUs...

Following yesterday's release of Wine 5.19, the developers responsible for the Wine-Staging have issued their corresponding update for this codebase that adds 600+ patches currently undergoing testing...

Intel's next Compute Runtime release is going to be exciting as OpenCL 3.0 will be enabled for all graphics hardware found going back to Broadwell CPUs...

Wine 5.19 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

After being in development for more than one year, it looks like with Linux 5.10 there will be EXT4 fast commit support...

Of the many new features in Linux 5.9 with its debut set for this weekend, one of the performance-related changes is Intel FSGSBASE support finally being mainlined. A half-decade after the Linux patches first appeared for this feature present in Intel CPUs going back to Ivy Bridge, the mainline kernel is now patched for this feature that can help out I/O and other context switching heavy workloads. Given many of the same workloads were negatively impacted by the CPU security mitigations of recent years, here is a look at the current mitigated vs. unmitigated performance difference on the Linux 5.9 kernel with an Intel Core i9 9900K CPU for reference on how the mitigation impact is on recent versions of the Linux kernel.

Back in August was the big surprise of file-system driver vendor Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that is much more advanced than the existing NTFS Linux driver. While not merged yet, on Friday the latest version was sent out for review...

Not only is the Plasma 5.20 desktop shining and more Wayland improvements and other enhancements queuing for Plasma 5.21, but the Plasma Mobile effort is also beginning to shine...

Expected with next year's Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs is the Intel DSA as the Data Streaming Accelerator for high performance data movement and transformation operations. Since the end of 2019 there have been Linux patches surfacing for bringing up the DSA support and now as we roll into 2021 the Linux kernel looks to begin making use of the new capabilities...

New to the RTX 30 series and the NVIDIA 455 Linux driver is decode support with VDPAU for VP9 10-bit and 12-bit content, which can now be taken advantage of by the popular FFmpeg multimedia library...