The sixth and final release candidate of PHP 7.4 is now available with it being on track for the general availability release before month's end.

Darktable 3.0 is coming soon as the next major release for this open-source RAW photography workflow software.

For those still on the GCC 7 series, GCC 7.5 was released this morning as the final point release to this compiler series with that branch that saw its original release in 2017 now closed.

When writing about the Intel Jump Conditional Code (JCC) Erratum and how Intel is working to mitigate the performance hit of the CPU microcode update with patches to the GNU Assembler, there was some concern expressed by readers that it might hurt AMD performance. That does not appear to be the case.

Released on Wednesday was the NVIDIA 435.27.06 Linux driver as their newest beta build focused on offering better Vulkan driver support.

Mesa 19.2.4 was released on Wednesday as an "emergency release" after a bug was discovered that made last week's Mesa 19.2.3 version buggy for all OpenGL drivers.

CodeWeavers is looking to hire another developer to work on Wine's graphics stack and in particular the WineD3D code while having an emphasis that it's part of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) efforts.

As of this morning LibreOffice 6.4 was branched from master and the beta release tagged with those LO 6.4 Beta binaries expected out shortly.

AMD on Tuesday released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 19.Q4 for Linux package as their newest quarterly driver release intended for their professional graphics card offerings.

The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API.

The second development release of Phoronix Test Suite 9.2-Hurdal is now available for open-source, cross-platform and fully-automated benchmarking.

Another Intel change being sent off for Linux 5.4 and to be back-ported to current stable series is disabling of HPET for Coffee Lake systems.

Over the past year Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics has been working extensively on the new AMD Radeon "GCN" back-end for the GCC code compiler. With the code that is found in GCC 9 and up to now in GCC 10 hasn't supported OpenMP/OpenACC parallel programming interfaces but that could soon change with patches under review.

Now that Intel lifted its embargo on the "Jump Conditional Code" erratum affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake processors, while Intel's own Clear Linux was first to carry these patches they have now been sent out on the Binutils mailing list for trying to get the JCC optimization patches into the upstream Binutils/GAS code-base.

Merged to the mainline Linux kernel last week was a driver providing VirtualBox guest shared folder support with the driver up to now being out-of-tree but important for sharing files between the host and guest VM(s). While the driver was part of Linux 5.4-rc7, Linus Torvalds decided to delete this driver on Tuesday.

Of the 77 security advisories Intel is making public and the three big ones of the performance-sensitive JCC Erratum, the new ZombieLoad TAA (TSX Asynchronous Abort), and iTLB Multihit No eXcuses, there are also two fixes to their kernel graphics driver around security issues separate from the CPU woes.

The Linux kernel has just received its mitigation work for the newly-announced TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) variant of ZombieLoad plus revealing mitigations for another Intel CPU issue... So today in addition to the JCC Erratum and ZombieLoad TAA the latest is iITLB Multihit (NX) - No eXcuses.

In addition to the JCC erratum being made public today and that performance-shifting Intel microcode update affecting Skylake through Cascade Lake, researchers also announced a new ZombieLoad side-channel attack variant dubbed "TSX Asynchronous Abort" or TAA for short.

Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat have announced the Bytecode Alliance as a new initiative built around WebAssembly and focused on providing a secure-by-default bytecode that can run from web browsers to desktops to IoT/embedded platforms.

LinuxBoot is approaching two years of age as the effort led by Facebook and others for replacing some elements of the system firmware with the Linux kernel.

For about three years now GNOME's SVG rendering library has been transitioning to Rust. This library, librsvg, now makes further use of Rust around its CSS parsing code and Mozilla's Servo is doing some of that heavy lifting.

In making it more easy to update Coreboot system firmware, the ability to update Coreboot via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd is finally being worked out.

The Adreno 640 GPU that is used by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855/855+ SoCs is now working with the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and "TURNIP" Vulkan drivers with the newest Mesa 20.0 development code.

A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver.

Taking place at the end of October during the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France was the GStreamer Conference to align with the annual developer festivities.

Sunday marked the release of KDE Frameworks 5.64 as the latest monthly update to this collection of libraries complementing Qt5.

Chrome has successfully shamed web-sites not supporting HTTPS and now they are looking to call-out websites that do not typically load fast.

SUSE and other companies like DigitalOcean have been working on Linux core scheduling to make virtualization safer particularly in light of security vulnerabilities like L1TF and MDS. The core scheduling work is about ensuring different VMs don't share a HT sibling but rather only the same VM / trusted applications run on siblings of a core.

From System76 setting up their own manufacturing facility for Linux desktops to Dell offering more Linux laptop options, the demand for pre-loaded Linux PCs continues to increase. One of the smaller Linux PC vendors also now expanding is German-based TUXEDO Computers.

Shortwave is a new Internet radio player built for GNOME with GTK3 and has been in development the past year.

The goal for Ubuntu 20.04 is to ship with Python 2 removed since Py2 will be end-of-life after the start of the year and this next Ubuntu Linux release is a Long-Term Support release, but there still are many Python 2 depending packages left currently in Debian unstable and Ubuntu's "Focal Fossa" archive.

Arch Linux has updated the behavior when installing the linux, linux-lts, linux-zen, and linux-hardened kernel options on this popular distribution.

Linux 5.4-rc7 was just released as the newest test candidate of the maturing Linux 5.4 kernel. At this stage it's looking like an eighth weekly RC will be warranted next weekend before officially releasing Linux 5.4.0 on 24 November.

Longtime Linux game developer Timothee Besset has outlined the support introduced by Valve this week in their latest Steam Linux client beta for supporting Linux namespaces / containers. This experimental functionality may in the end provide better support for 32-bit compatibility as more Linux distributions focus solely on x86_64 packages, reducing some of the fragmentation/library conflicts between some Linux distributions and Steam, and other headaches currently plaguing the Steam Linux space.

While Linux 5.4 is rolling out in about two weeks, the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has just been updated for Linux 5.3 support.

Over the past year and a half the VKMS Linux DRM driver has come together as the "virtual kernel mode-setting" implementation for headless systems and other environments not backed by a physical display. Interestingly being tacked on their TODO list now is VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) support. Separately, the prominent VKMS developer is now employed by AMD.

Pardon for the rather slow pace of new Phoronix content over the past week (in particular, the lack of big benchmark articles) due to my wife giving birth early and being in the hospital for a few days, but the remainder of November is set to be quite exciting on the Linux/open-source performance front. Here is some of what else is on tap for November.

Taking place 4 and 5 November in San Francisco was the OpenZFS Developer Summit. This two-day open-source ZFS developer summit made possible by Intel, Delphix, Datto, and OSNexus had a lot of interesting presentations from the state of ZFS TRIM/Discard to debugging topics.

The Thunderbolt changes have been merged to char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window.

The first alpha release of the forthcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now available for testing with this Clang-built Linux distribution that originates back to the days of Mandrake.

It's been another busy week in KDE land with developers working through the massive code-bases comprising the KDE desktop environment on a variety of features and fixes.