If 2020 couldn't get more peculiar, today the SDL2 project mainlined support for the OS/2 operating system.

While OS/2 is no longer maintained by IBM and was never really a gaming platform for where SDL2 is most commonly used, this software library that serves as an abstraction layer for multimedia/gaming hardware components and software platforms has merged the OS/2 port.

SDL2 supports all major platforms given how widely used the software is especially among cross-platform games but rather

Mesa 20.2 officially released at the end of September as the Q3'2020 open-source driver stack update providing open-source OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan support for much of the graphics hardware on the market. For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading, that milestone was reached today.

Mesa 20.2.1 was just released with the initial batch of fixes following the big 20.2 feature release. Mesa 20.2.1 has

The Linux kernel's fundamental printk() function for printing messages at various log levels for then accessing via the likes of dmesg is beginning to see a significant overhaul.

Coming with Linux 5.10 is now a fully lock-less ring-buffer implementation for printk. This new implementation allows for storing and reading messages without the possibility of deadlocks or relying on temporary per-CPU buffers.

This fully lock-less ring-buffer though is still relying on a log buffer lock but the hope is that for

Intel today is revealing a few details concerning upcoming Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors.

Today the company is just talking security features of Ice Lake Xeon. The company is confirming these upcoming Xeon CPUs will support:

- Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). While a number of security vulnerabilities around SGX have been disclosed since its debut in Skylake (Prime+Probe, LVI, SGAxe, Plundervolt, etc), Intel argues in today's announcement that it " is the most researched, updated

While the LibreOffice fork is much more popular than OpenOffice these days, the Apache Software Foundation does continue maintaining the OpenOffice codebase born out of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice.

It's been twenty years already since Sun initially open-sourced the office suite as OpenOffice. While the OpenOffice 1.0 release didn't come until two years later (2002) and wasn't until 2011 that Oracle transferred OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation, Apache is celebrating twenty years of OpenOffice.

The UBports community that continues advancing the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform has been working on improvements to its installer.

The UBports installer is out with a new beta that enables Samsung support, can now be used behind a network proxy, and has a number of other installation fixes. With this beta, the Google Nexus 6P is also now supported for installing Ubuntu Touch on it.

Past this current beta, developers are working on upgrading the Electron support as well as improvements for handling installs on the Raspberry Pi and Pinebook Pro.

Following this month's Intel programming reference manual update disclosing a number of new instruction set extensions , Intel's compiler engineers have gone public with patches for implementing some of these forthcoming CPU features.

The latest GCC compiler-side work around new instruction set extensions coming to future generations of Intel CPUs include:

Key Locker Support - Intel has already been adding Key Locker support to other parts of the GNU toolchain and the LLVM support also landed while the GCC support should be here for GCC 11. Key Locker works with

The kernel power management changes have been sent in for Linux 5.10 with a few items worth pointing out from faster hibernation to fixing power management handling for AMD laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics.

There have been a number of bug reports concerning AMD Renoir laptops with dual AMD GPUs (both integrated and discrete graphics like the RX 5600M) where there are lock-ups on system sleep and high power consumption in general.

Independent Linux developer Lukas Wunner tracked the issue down to discovering that the