After a half-decade working toward it, Ruby 3.0 was released on Christmas Day with much greater performance and other features for this high-level general purpose programming language.

Ruby 3.0 was developed with a focus of greater performance, concurrency, and typing and successfully achieved its goal of being 3.0x faster than the performance of Ruby 2.0. That 3.0x speed-up is when making use of the new Ruby 3.0 Just-In-Time (JIT)

It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.

Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa

Linux 5.10 as a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel has been off to a rocky start after an immediate point release due to a RAID issue , some reporting AMDGPU problems, and also a staggering Btrfs performance regression hitting some users.

Making rounds this week was word of a "500~2000% performance regression" knocking Btrfs on Linux 5.10. For a simple test case like extracting a large .tar.zst file could go from taking just around 1

Redox OS, the micro-kernel based Rust-written operating system, is out with a new Christmas release.

Redox OS 0.6 was released on Christmas Eve with many bug fixes and new features. Redox OS 0.6 features a complete rewrite of its RMM kernel memory manager, improvements to its Relibc C library implementation, Pkgar as a new package format, and Rust code compatibility updates.

It's been the better part of two years since Redox 0.5 was released but moving forward they hope to

For those looking to get involved with the Fedora project in manner besides the likes of coding and documentation, a Fedora Zine is being established and are looking for creative submissions.

The "Fedora Zine" is being established as part of the Outreachy 2020 winter round . The Fedora Zine is to recognize "the wide variety of work being done here at Fedora" and to provide engagement with the community. The Fedora Zine is intended to be distributed at conferences and other events, well, once the pandemic is over

It's looking like Wasmer 1.0 will be released early in the new year as the open-source WebAssembly run-time for desktops or to run WASM code anywhere as a "universal runtime" in contexts outside of the web browser.

Wasmer has been making much progress over the past year and closing in on their version 1.0 milestone. Following the beta earlier this month that added Apple Silicon (Apple M1) support and other improvements, this WebAssembly macOS / Windows / Linux run-time is

Well here is a pleasant Christmas surprise... Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux.

This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver.

A few days ago I noted nice AMD EPYC performance improvements with PostgreSQL when running on Linux 5.11 compared to prior kernels. I've confirmed that for even more AMD EPYC servers now that the PostgreSQL uplift is there, but other workloads are unfortunately regressing for both Ryzen and EPYC. Here's the start of an exciting Christmas benchmarking adventure looking at this change with Linux 5.11...

The aforelinked article noticed some of the very healthy PostgreSQL database server performance improvements to find with Linux 5