The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance.

FMA3 has been supported by CPUs for years going back to AMD Piledriver and Intel Haswell for fused multiply-add. Now in 2021, Ardour is supporting optional usage of FMA on capable processors. The initial use-case for FMA in Ardour is for the multiply accumulate operations within audio channel mixing. The initial code was found to indeed

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 5.11 is now available for testing.

Since last Sunday's 5.11-rc1 release that marked the end of the merge window, not a lot has changed. Due to the timing around the Christmas and New Year holidays, Linux 5.11-rc2 is a "tiny" release. Torvalds noted in today's announcement, " people have (rightly) mostly been offline since, presumably over-eating and doing all the other

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread.

Linus argues that error-correcting code (ECC) memory "absolutely matters" but that " Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly

Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking.

Dav1d 0.8 offers up more optimizations . One of the main optimizations this

In ending out a strong year for OpenBenchmarking.org growth in 2020, there were also many test profile updates and some new test profiles (benchmarks) that were made available in December for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org users.

Among the updates over the past month worth pointing out for those running their own benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite are listed below. First up the new tests followed by the updated ones.

node-web-tooling - The latest Node.js benchmark added is the Node

LLVM has added support for PowerPC LE (32-bit) as its newest target.

While LLVM has supported the PowerPC architecture for years, to date it's been focused on the big endian support. Most PowerPC hardware supports both big and little endian modes and can be switched at run-time. While Linux and others tend to focus on PowerPC support in big endian mode, LLVM has added a PowerPC LE option.

Adding this 32-bit PowerPC Little Endian support to LLVM in 2021

The numbers Steam posted on New Year's Day for the December 2020 Linux gaming marketshare showed a drop of 0.33% down to just 0.57% . That is a rather large drop but now Valve has updated their numbers and point to Linux still regressing percentage wise but not as bad as originally reported.

After being at 0.9% for the month of November, Valve's revised December 2020 numbers put the Linux gaming marketshare at 0.74

Building off yesterday's Wine 6.0-RC5 test release is an updated Wine-Staging build that adds nearly 800 patches atop the upstream code-base for experimental/testing features.

Wine-Staging 6.0-RC5 doesn't change much given Wine's upstream feature freeze ahead of the Wine 6.0 release in the next few weeks. Plus there has been the Christmas and New Year holidays.

But the sole new patch introduced with Wine-Staging 6.0-

Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer.

Linux 5.10 was released in December as the 2020 Long Term Support kernel. Besides being an LTS kernel, it's packed with many new features . Linux 5.10 releases were off to a bumpy ride but things have begun settling down with the latest point releases.

Before shipping Linux 5.10 to Fedora users, developers have organized