With Linux 5.8 there is initial support for booting POWER10 CPUs while with Linux 5.9 there is more POWER10 work underway. Additionally, Linux 5.9 is bringing support for the newer and faster system call ABI for POWER9 and newer with the SCV instruction.

Going back to last year Fedora has been working to enable link-time optimizations by default for their packages. That goal wasn't achieved for Fedora 32 but for Fedora 33 this autumn they still have chances of marking that feature off their TODO list.

The Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor that has 48 cores per node and 32GB of HBM2 memory that currently powers the fastest supercomputer is beginning to see GCC compiler support.

The "staging" area of the kernel, where new drivers and other code live that has yet to prove itself or live up to kernel code quality standards, saw a few drivers graduate into Linux mainline proper for the current 5.9 cycle.

There are many improvements in LLVM/Clang 11.0 due out in the weeks ahead though an interesting change merged prior to last month's code branching that slipped under our radar... If using the clang-cl driver for MSVC or when otherwise making use of pre-compiled headers (PCH) functionality, there is a new option that can offer significant build time speed-ups.

Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes.

Kodi 19 "Matrix" Alpha 1 has been released for this very popular, cross-platform open-source HTPC software.

The Linux kernel continues supporting a lot more audio devices and much more punctual than a decade or two ago.

This week Mesa developers began drafting plans for transitioning their primary Git branch to "main", following the naming plans of other open-source projects using Git.

Each kernel cycle the networking subsystem sees a lot of churn given the importance of network interconnect performance and reliability especially in high performance computing environments where Linux dominates.

Getting KDE's Wayland session into shape remains a priority for developers this year and it's looking like the support should be quite slick come Plasma 5.20.

The "char/misc" area of the kernel continues to be quite busy for Linux 5.9 included as a sort of "catch-all" for the Linux kernel drivers not properly jiving within other areas. While there previously was talk of formally making a hardware accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel for fitting some of the drivers currently living under char/misc, as of Linux 5.9 that still has not materialized.

The first beta of the forthcoming Mageia 8 is now available, the Linux distribution that traces its roots back to Mandriva/Mandrake.

There are a number of notable power management changes to find with the Linux 5.9 kernel.

Following the recent Intel Comet Lake Celeron and Pentium CPU benchmarking against other x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs, here was a bit of fun... Seeing how these budget Intel CPUs compare to a Raspberry Pi 4 in various processor benchmarks, all tested on Debian Linux.

For those using Wine in a production environment for running Windows software on Linux, Wine 5.0.2 is out as the latest stable update.

There are a few driver core changes for the Linux 5.9 kernel worth mentioning.

It looks like Intel will soon be tagging their oneAPI Level Zero specification as version 1.0.

Just under two months since Radeon Software for Linux 20.20 that is comprised of the AMDGPU-Open and AMDGPU-PRO driver components for these packaged drivers, Radeon Software for Linux 20.30 was quietly released at the end of last week.

More kernel architecture features continue to be supported by the RISC-V code with Linux 5.9.

The latest open-source code snapshot of AMD's official Vulkan driver is now available.

Security researchers from Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz are out with their latest findings on CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, namely taking another look at L1TF/Foreshadow. Their findings are bad news not only for Intel but potentially other CPU vendors as well.

The USB and Thunderbolt subsystem changes have already been merged into the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.

Earlier this year at GTC Digital was the announcement of the NVIDIA High Performance Computing Software Development Kit while this week they have finally released this HPC SDK for developers at large.

Feature work on Mesa 20.2 is now over with the code having been branched today and Mesa 20.2-RC1 subsequently issued.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates were sent in today for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window. There are some big additions particularly with AMD Sienna Cichlid and Navy Flounder landing as Navi 2 parts but also a lot of other changes in tow.

For those that prefer waiting until the first point release of a new Ubuntu Long Term Support series before upgrading, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is out with the latest bug and security fixes for the "Focal Fossa" release.

Fedora's less talked about "Internet of Things" (IoT) edition is looking to be promoted to an official spin for Fedora 33.

The Linux perf events changes for the performance monitoring subsystem were already sent in and pulled for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.

GNU C Library 2.32 (glibc 2.32) is now available as this important library for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

The release of PHP 8.0 is now one step closer to reality with the first beta being issued today and this also marking the feature freeze for this version due out later in the year.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Pavel Machek has taken over as sole maintainer of the LED subsystem. For this first pull request going into Linux 5.9 is a big addition... The multi-color LED framework code has finally been merged.

NVMe 2.0's Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) functionality is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel.

While Fedora 33 is slated to default to the Btrfs file-system for desktop spins, for those on Fedora Server 33 or otherwise not using the defaults will have Stratis Storage 2.1 as another option.

The METRICFS file-system has been in use internally at Google since 2012 for exporting system statistics to their telemetry systems with around 200 statistics being exported per machine. They are now posting the METRICFS patches as open-source for review and possible upstreaming.

Mesa 20.1.5 provides the latest stable open-source Vulkan/OpenGL graphics drivers for the Linux desktop as the newest bi-weekly milestone.

The Free Software Foundation has elected a new president following Richard Stallman's resignation last September from the FSF.

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has resorted to disabling SDMA (System DMA) async DMA engine support for all GFX9/Vega hardware due to issues plaguing some APUs.

FS-Cache provides the Linux kernel with a general purpose cache for network file-systems like NFS and AFS but also other special use-cases like ISO9660 file-systems. FS-Cache has been rewritten for better performance and reliability, among other benefits, and while it has been sent in as a pull request for Linux 5.9 even its own developers provide some caution over landing it this cycle.

Sent out over the weekend was a patch series for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver entitled "Time, where did it go?" This set of 42 patches aims to provide incremental improvements to the driver to offset a performance regression in Linux 5.7 that Intel hasn't been able to track down. This increased complication of the driver to offset the regression is now under the microscope.

LibreOffice 7.0 has been released! Making LibreOffice 7.0 so exciting is that the Cairo code was replaced with Google's Skia library and in the process gaining optional support for GPU accelerating the user-interface with Vulkan.

Google engineers have been working on the Machine Function Splitter as their means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this compiler-based approach. They are now seeking to upstream the Machine Function Splitter into LLVM.

The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem has a new driver that is likely to excite some enthusiasts wanting greater control over thermal monitoring and fan control for their systems.

With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago.

The GNU Debugger (GDB) has merged initial support for debugging of eBPF code that is traditionally consumed by the Linux kernel as part of this in-kernel special purpose virtual machine.