Last week was the main set of ARM 64-bit architecture updates for Linux 5.10 while today a second batch of changes were sent in for this kernel. That first round had the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Pointer Authentication support among other improvements while this secondary pull has two notable performance optimizations.

First up is a performance optimization that the Arm developers acknowledge was seemingly forgotten about for some two years. Back in 2018 was a memory management speed-up by around 20x

Ubuntu 20.10 , the "Groovy Gorilla", is now officially available.

Ubuntu 20.10 features many improvements like:

- The GNOME 3.38 desktop is available with a wealth of improvements there including several performance optimizations / fixes handled by Canonical's desktop team.

- The Ubiquity installer now has Microsoft Active Directory integration.

- Continued work on the experimental OpenZFS file-system support that is available as an option when installing Ubuntu.

- Linux 5.8 and Mesa 20

In an effort to better cater towards newer and common x86_64 instruction set extensions, open-source toolchain developers are moving ahead with the work on x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for being able to target a handful of different "levels" beyond the base x86_64 instruction set.

The x86_64 feature levels are for easily segregating different classes of x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs in hopes of making it easier for

The NFS client code with Linux 5.10 has another performance optimization.

The NFS client code now supports the READ_PLUS operation supported by NFS v4.2 and later. READ_PLUS is a variant of READ that supports efficiently transferring holes. In cases where READ_PLUS is supported by both the NFS client and server, this operation should always be used rather than READ.

READ_PLUS should principally allow for better read performance when dealing with sparse files. The performance results may vary depending upon whether

The FreeBSD project has published their Q3-2020 report on the state of this leading BSD operating system.

Among the highlights they made during the third quarter include:

- The FreeBSD Foundation issued additional grants around WiFi and Linux KPI layer improvements, Linux application compatibility improvements with the Linuxulator, DRM/graphics driver updates, Zstd compression for OpenZFS, online RAID-Z expansion, and modernizing the LLDB target support for FreeBSD.

- FreeBSD Foundation staff members have been working to improve the build infrastructure, ARM6

The PCI changes were submitted on Wednesday for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

The PCI subsystem updates for Linux 5.10 aren't too exciting this round but there are a few items worth noting. One change is the enabling of ACS translation blocking for external PCIe devices in protecting against possible DMA attacks.

Translation Blocking is enabled for untrusted/external PCIe devices to harden against direct memory access attacks. ACS (Access Control Services) Translation Blocking will block any request with the AT bit set as an effort

Following last week's big Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 and the new OpenBenchmarking.org , a small update is out this week to address some initial hiccups.

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0.1 fixes support if using the stock PHP package of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7 / CentOS 7) and other distributions relying on dated versions of PHP that there could be an error on installation of tests.

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0.1 also has improved detection in its Phoronix Device

While all eyes are on the AMD Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards set to be announced next week, it also looks like AMD is preparing for a Navi 1x "Blockchain" graphics card offering given the latest work in their open-source Linux driver.

Patches posted today provide support for a new Navi graphics card referred to as the "navi10 blockchain SKU."

The Navi 10 part has a device ID of 0x731E. From the AMDGPU Linux

While the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) on Windows allows for undervolting laptop processors, currently on Linux there isn't any Intel-endorsed way for undervolting your CPU should you be interested in better thermal/power efficiency and other factors. But a hypothetical Linux kernel driver could be coming for filling such void.

There does exist the intel-undervolt program that is unofficial and developed by an independent developer for undervolting Intel CPUs from Haswell and newer on Linux. Besides dropping the CPU voltage, it also allows manipulating the