Phoronix

Firefox 82.0 is now available as the latest release of Mozilla's web browser that continues on their expedited release cycles...

The Xen virtualization work for the Linux 5.10 kernel revolves around security...

AMD has issued their first open-source Vulkan driver code drop of the quarter with AMDVLK 2020.Q4.1...

Last week saw the XFS file-system with Linux 5.10 support timestamps until the year 2486 rather than year 2038 and other improvements too. This week a second round of XFS work has landed for Linux 5.10...

It was just two weeks ago that the Qt 6.0 Alpha released, but in aiming to get the release back on schedule, the beta is already shipping today...

The FreeType text rendering library is out with version 2.10.4 today as an important security update...

The RISC-V architecture code with Linux 5.10 adds the ability for booting via (U)EFI...

From my Tiger Lake testing so far with the Core i7 1165G7, the "Gen12" Xe Graphics have been quite compelling with a very nice upgrade over Gen11 and especially obvious win over the very common still Gen9 graphics. With Mesa 20.3, another measurable performance is on the way for the Intel Vulkan driver with Tiger Lake...

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

Trisquel 9.0 has been released as one of the few Linux distributions approved by the Free Software Foundation...

The FUSE implementation for supporting file-systems in user-space is seeing important kernel work merged for Linux 5.10...

Git 2.29 is now available with experimental support for using SHA-256 to increase security of code repositories over the possibility of intentional SHA-1 collisions with the current indices...

An independent party has slowly begun merging patches into mainline Mesa for allowing the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to build on Microsoft Windows...

Last week I published initial benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" performance on Linux with the Dell XPS 13 9310 Developer Edition laptop. Of most surprise from those preliminary Linux figures were finding that for some single-threaded workloads the performance was actually worse than the previous generation Ice Lake. Since then I've been running more tests around the clock with some interesting discoveries to note today. It is possible to enhance the single-threaded performance so it's performing better than Ice Lake as would be expected, but comes with lowering the multi-threaded performance compared to the results shared last week.

Vulkan 1.2.158 was released this morning with two notable extensions introduced...

Independent Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas (and retired anaesthetist) is back on track with a new update to his "CK" patch-set and the MuQSS scheduler...

Should you want to use the Ada programming language for GPU programming, the GCC compiler has been working on CUDA support within its front-end for this safety and security minded language...

The "char/misc" area within the Linux kernel continues to have a bit of everything as the "catch all" pull request of the kernel not fitting into other existing subsystems...

Building off Linux 5.9 that featured initial support for Gen12 graphics on next year's Rocket Lake desktop platform along with other early enablement for Rocket Lake like RAPL support and other PCI ID additions, that work has continued for the Linux 5.10 cycle...

One of AMD's compiler experts this week sent out a patch wiring up Zen 3 support in the important GNU Binutils collection for Linux systems...