Intel's open-source oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler saw a Christmas Day update with the 2020-12 monthly update.

Intel's oneAPI DPC++ Compiler is their LLVM Clang based compiler focused on supporting their Data Parallel C++ dialect of C++ focused for heterogeneous programming from CPUs to GPUs and other possible accelerators like FPGAs. Friday's release was the monthly update to this open-source compiler stack focused on the C++ and SYCL support.

With oneAPI

Linux 5.11-rc1 is due for release later today and at least one regression has seen a quick resolution.

Intel's kernel test robot saw a ~1.6% performance regression in one of its scheduler benchmarks. The change causing the regression was trying to ensure only per-CPU KThreads run during hotplug.

Thanks to that timely testing by Intel, There is a fix of optimizing the finish_lock_switch() function within the scheduler code. Kernel developer Peter Zijlstra noted, "

Back in 2010 was a change to disable run-time power management of PCI devices by default and leaving it up to user-space to in turn override it if desired. Now as we gear up for 2021, some upstream kernel developers are wondering about that original decision and possibly changing the default behavior to yield better out-of-the-box power savings with modern systems.

That change a decade ago to force off run-time power management by default for PCI devices noted,

The HAMMER2 file-system that has been used by default on DragonFlyBSD for some time has lacked multi-volumes support compared to its former HAMMER1 file-system. But as of this weekend in the latest Git development code, HAMMER2 now has initial support for multiple volumes.

HAMMER2 with the upcoming DragonFlyBSD 6.0 has initial multi-volumes support in place with currently being able to handle up to 64 volumes. The functionality is similar to that of HAMMER1 for allowing a HAMMER2 file-

While being released one day late due to Christmas, Wine 6.0-RC4 is out. This is the latest weekly test candidate of the forthcoming Wine 6.0 as the annual stable release due out in January for this leading software to run Windows programs/games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs.

While the Christmas holiday led to some time off for many developers, Wine 6.0-RC4 is still a sizable update with 29 bug fixes having landed in the past week.

Among

Linux 5.10.3 is out today as a post-Christmas stable release update.

Linux 5.10.3 does not contain any back-ported fix for the Btrfs performance regression so that will likely come in a later point release. The Linux 5.10.3 changes are mostly an assortment of minor bug fixes throughout the massive code-base.

But there is one set of fixes worth pointing out: the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework used by the likes of EXT4,

Even with Christmas week there has been a lot of improvements still happening in the KDE world.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out today with his usual weekly summary of the development happenings over the past week. Some of the Christmas week 2020 improvements include:

- KDE's KIO-FUSE saw its first stable release as the desktop's FUSE-based remote location mounter.

- NeoChat is KDE's Matrix-based chat application, which was forked from the Spectral program.

- The Kate text editor

One of the pleasant kernel surprises in 2020 was Paragon Software looking to upstream their previously commercial NTFS driver . This driver offers read-write support and more advanced capabilities than the current read-focused NTFS driver presently in the mainline kernel and better off than the other FUSE-based driver. This driver hasn't been mainlined yet but Paragon published new patches on Christmas.

On Christmas came the 16th spin of these patches for offering the NTFS read-write GPL-licensed driver from Paragon Software.