Phoronix

While there are a lot of new end-user features with Linux 5.6, there are also some changes not yet mainlined. Here are six that come to mind as missing out on the Linux 5.6 merge window...

For those using OpenBLAS as your BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) implementation, OpenBLAS 0.3.8 was released this weekend and coming with it are more AVX2/AVX-512 kernels and other optimizations...

AMD this morning announced the Radeon Pro W5500 as their latest workstation graphics card designed for modern design and engineering needs...

While there are many new features in the forthcoming Linux 5.6 kernel, the ongoing Address Space Isolation support is not one of them...

The Outreachy application period opened at the end of January for their summer 2020 internship round while just two weeks remain to get in your applications should you looking to be getting involved with open-source/Linux development...

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has spent years now working on Nouveau SPIR-V support and other GPU open-source compute efforts around Mesa has provided a trivial implementation of clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties() that is now enough to begin running the OpenCL 2.0 conformance test suite on the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker...

Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 5.6-rc1 as the first test kernel of the forthcoming Linux 5.6. This is going to be a jam-packed big update debuting as stable at the end of March or early April...

Out this Sunday is OpenShot 2.5 as the non-linear video editor's biggest release yet for this cross-platform, open-source solution...

The Linux 5.6 merge window is anticipated to be ending today followed by the Linux 5.6-rc1 test release. This kernel is simply huge: there is so many new and improved features with this particular release that it's mind-boggling. I'm having difficulty remembering such a time a kernel release was so large.

One of the last features to land today for Linux 5.6 ahead of the merge window closure is Western Digital's Zonefs file-system...

After being added to Linux 5.4 and then being ejected a week later when it was clear not enough testing took place, the VirtualBox Shared Folder "VBOXSF" driver is now trying to make it into Linux 5.6...

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is planned for release on Tuesday, 11 February, which means a mad rush of last minute fixes for this desktop as well as developers already working on Plasma 5.19 that is aiming for release in early June...

As first to write about yesterday, Linux 5.6 Arm platform changes now support the original Amazon Echo. While this allows the first-generation Amazon Echo to run with a mainline Linux kernel and is exciting for hobbyists, it's not really practical at this stage or even in the long-run...

Fedora 30 and Fedora 31 users will soon see Linux 5.5 come down as a stable update, but before then you can help if so inclined to test this new kernel revision on Fedora...

The X11 client support for Mir that leverages XWayland is graduating from its "experimental" status...

For those using GNU Make in particular as their build system, the parallel build times are about to be a lot faster beginning with Linux 5.6 for large core count systems. This landing just after the AMD Threadripper 3990X 64-core / 128-thread CPU launch is one example of systems to benefit from this kernel change when compiling a lot of code and making use of many GNU Make jobs...

GNOME 3.35.90 is available this weekend as the first of two betas towards GNOME 3.36...

There is a lot of new Arm SoCs and boards/platforms to be supported by the Linux 5.6 kernel...

Out this weekend is GDB 9.1 as the newest feature update to the GNU Debugger...

Out this weekend are the stable updates Debian 10.3 and Debian 9.12...