The Panfrost open-source Gallium3D driver matured into good shape over the course of 2020 with providing OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware. As we enter 2021 it will be interesting to see this year if any "Panfrost Vulkan" driver materializes for open-source Vulkan support on the newer Mali graphics hardware. But at least one area making interesting process is in regards to OpenCL compute support.

There is a CL branch under development for OpenCL support with Arm Mali "Midgard" hardware

After 219 Linux hardware reviews / benchmark featured articles and 3,206 original news articles on Phoronix for 2020, it's finally time to put a wrap on this year... Happy New Year and 2021 couldn't have come soon enough!

2020 is finally in the books and a couple hours time off before getting to the 2021 open-source/Linux coverage and benchmarking in the morning. Thanks to those that continue to

Thanks to the ongoing upstream improvements being pursued by Lenovo as part of their effort to enhance their product support, the Linux power management tree has picked up the initial ACPI Platform Profile implementation for benefiting newer devices like Lenovo laptops.

The ACPI Platform Profile support is around modifying the system's operating profile to control characteristics around power/performance levels, thermal, and fan speed behavior. The Linux kernel ACPI Platform Profile support allows for the operating profile to be modified via sysfs.

The overall concept is similar to that of what

This month marks ten years since OpenBenchmarking.org initially went online as part of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 development (though didn't officially launch until February 2011). In 2020 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 came a major OpenBenchmarking.org upgrade as the biggest in its history. As 2020 wraps up, here is a look at the OpenBenchmarking.org growth by the numbers.

OpenBenchmarking.org continues enjoying incredible growth for leading open-source, fully

The GNOME desktop environment saw many enhancements in 2020 including a number of significant performance optimizations. While GNOME on Wayland has been solid for some time, there has been further enhancements there too. This year also brought the much anticipated GTK 4.0 toolkit release that will be interesting to see how its adoption goes next year. GNOME 40 is also in development for debut in the spring as the successor to this autumn's successful GNOME 3.38 release.

Looking back at GNOME over the course

Rust 1.49 was released today for ending out 2020 with this popular programming language. Most notable with Rust 1.49 is the 64-bit ARM Linux support state being promoted.

Rust 1.49 has promoted their 64-bit ARM Linux support to being a Tier-1 target, which is the highest support guarantee and on par with the likes of Rust's x86_64 support. Rust has long worked well on 64-bit ARM

Yesterday Intel released an updated open-source Media SDK for leveraging media acceleration on their graphics hardware. Along with that out today is the Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 release as their dedicated Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems.

The Intel Media Driver 20.4.5 update is their Q4'2020 update to this open-source VA-API implementation. Like in recent quarters, their focus has been on wiring up more functionality for Gen1

The Linux kernel with the likes of ARM and x86 hardware leverage kernel infrastructure for reporting their relevant CPU security mitigations while only now the MIPS kernel code is seeing work to report such vulnerabilities. However, on the MIPS front it's more difficult with some vendors not publicly acknowledging vulnerabilities and other cases of MIPS hardware vendors no longer producing the hardware in question or even in business.

Sent out yesterday were patches providing MIPS vulnerabilities infrastructure for the Linux kernel, similar to that for other architectures.

With the patches developer

Con Kolivas took some time out of his New Year's Eve to release Linux 5.10-ck1 as his independent patch-set applied to the recently minted Linux 5.10 kernel and with that the latest MuQSS scheduler.

Kolivas announced Linux 5.10-ck1 today paired with MuQSS 0.205 as the latest of his kernel scheduler optimized for system responsiveness and interactivity.

There are no fundamental changes with the updated patches besides taking them inline with Linux 5.10