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As we have been expecting, as of a few minutes ago in Mesa 20.2-devel Git, the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has enabled the Valve-backed ACO shader compiler by default rather than AMD's official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

After covering the Linux patches for FSGSBASE for years, it's looking like Linux 5.9 will finally land the support for this CPU capability present since Ivy Bridge on the Intel side and more recently on AMD CPUs with Bulldozer and Zen. Here are benchmarks looking at some of the performance benefits the Linux FSGSBASE patches can provide for an Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh server.

The Linux 5.9 kernel is slated to begin introducing new restrictions on allowing writes to CPU model specific registers (MSRs) from user-space...

While Intel has been providing daily snapshots of the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) open-source compiler, today marks the latest monthly feature compiler release to their cross-architecture language for direct programming that is based on C++ while leveraging SYCL, LLVM/Clang, and other open-source technologies for exploiting the potential of hardware from CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs...

Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson has issued a call for help in porting work for Plasma 6.0...

Intel's open-source Linux developers have got the Tiger Lake and Gen12 graphics support largely squared away at this point, but a few remaining features remain. One of the features new to Tigerlake/Gen12+ on the graphics side is HOBL, or "Hours of Battery Life", while the Linux support there is still being tidied up...

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.5 Wayland compositor is now available for testing that continues to be inspired by the i3 design while being at the forefront of Wayland capabilities...

While Mesa 20.2 is the exciting development version in the works for release next quarter, those of you on the current Mesa 20.1 series now have the second point release available...

A Google engineer has posted patches for review so that the mainline Linux kernel can be built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by the LLVM Clang code compiler...

Taking place this week is the virtual Perl + Raku "Conference in the Cloud" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event to go virtual. A big announcement out of it is Perl 7...

Flatpak 1.8 stable is out today as this leading open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution technology...

Earlier this month a NVIDIA 450 Linux beta driver popped out as part of the CUDA 11.0 release candidate. Today though is the first public and generally available NVIDIA 450 series Linux driver beta for all users...

Earlier this month was a look at the Windows 10 May 2020 Update performance for WSL/WSL2 with many benchmarks and testing on an Intel Core i9 10900K. Here is a follow-up round of testing this time with HEDT performance in the form of running an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and running even more benchmarks up to 172 in total for this comparison of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS against WSL and WSL2 performance on this newest Microsoft Windows 10 update.

As of today in Mesa 20.2-devel Git, the Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) with the ACO back-end is now effectively at feature-parity to the default AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end...

Building off Phoronix Test Suite 9.8 M1 from the start of June, the second development "milestone" release is now available for our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking software...

AMDVLK 2020.Q2.5 is out today as the newest snapshot of this open-source official AMD Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems...

It should hardly come as a surprise if you regularly follow the Mesa quarterly release cadence for these open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers, but a release schedule has now been committed for next quarter's Mesa 20.2...

Intel's P-State CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux systems has been seeing a number of refinements lately including some major changes like shifting towards the "Schedutil" scheduler utilization governor by default. Further tuning with new/changed knobs is also on the way for giving users more control over their CPU power / performance preferences...

Microsoft has posted their initial patch implementing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the synthetic video device exposed by their Hyper-V virtualization stack...

One of many high profile features that didn't make it in time for Linux 5.8 is FGKASLR, Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization...