With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's been out in public form since last month and being developed as part of the soon-to-be-released Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 , here is the latest feature now enabled in making it much easier for quickly carrying out high-level processor (CPU) and graphics card (GPU) component comparisons along with other improvements.

For CPUs and GPUs where there are multiple (3+) test results for a particular test profile (and any relevant options)

The Linux 5.9 kernel could be released as soon as today but more than likely will be pushed back to next Sunday given Torvalds' comments last week and continuing to see plenty of merge requests in recent days. But in any case when Linux 5.9 does ship very soon it comes with an abundance of new features and improvements.

While we have been covering Linux 5.9 changes since even before the merge window opened two months ago based on what had been queuing in the "-next" trees,

While the wiesn (Oktoberfest) was cancelled this year, a few Phoronix readers inquired whether I was going to offer the traditional "Oktoberfest special" sale for Phoronix Premium to help support our daily Linux/open-source news, hardware reviews, and benchmarking during this turbulent year. So, yes, here is our annual Oktoberfest special if you would like to show your support during these COVID times.

Through next weekend, end of day 11 October (regardless of timezone), you can "go premium" at

SHADERed as the open-source, cross-platform shader integrated development environment now has a compute shader debugger built-in.

SHADERed allows for debugging various types of shaders, supports plug-ins for integration with various other systems, an instant view of shader modifications, and can even be done from a web browser in addition to the Linux and Windows support.

With this morning's SHADERed 1.4.1 release there is a compute shader debugger added to complement the other debuggers for other shader types. SHADERed 1

Linux 5.10 will bring a new driver for the Intel MAX10 BMC.

The Intel MAX10 "board management controller" is found on the Intel FPGA cards like the N3000 programmable acceleration card. With Linux 5.10 there is a new hwmon driver for supporting the MAX10 BMC. This driver in turn allows collected sensors like voltage, current, thermal, and power to be exposed under Linux for monitoring purposes.

If you frequently put your system(s) through hibernation cycles, the performance should be much better beginning with the soon-to-start Linux 5.10 cycle.

A change set to land for the upcoming Linux 5.10 merge window allows the batching of hibernate/resume I/O requests in order to speed-up both the hibernation and resume processes.

Up to now the Linux kernel has surprisingly relied on submitting individual I/O requests for each page of data, but now with Linux 5

The EXT4 file-system with the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel has an optimization yielding big benefits for file overwrites in some circumstances.

With the EXT4 iomap code used in direct access (DAX) and direct I/O (DIO) modes there is an optimization for checking whether blocks are already allocated. In these cases of the blocks already having been allocated (hence an overwrite), the mapping information can be returned immediately and for multi-threaded overwrite requests there is an especially big performance benefit -

The first patchwork is building up for Intel's "Meteor Lake" on Linux.

Meteor Lake is Intel's first 7nm microarchitecture not expected until late 2022 or 2023 that will pair "Ocean Cove" with "Gracemont" cores as the successor to Alder Lake. Intel engineers continue doing a lot of bring-up work for Alder Lake in recent months and that work coming together nicely for the Linux kernel and related components like the GNU and LLVM compiler toolchains. With the Alder

Intel updated their programming reference manual this week with some interesting new additions, primarily around user interrupts and the enhanced hardware feedback interface.

While Intel has already disclosed AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions) as coming with Sapphire Rapids and some other new instructions, they have now disclosed more instructions that are on the way. Some appear to be coming with Sapphire Rapids while others on the client side with Alder Lake. New Intel instructions documented by this latest PRM revision include CLUI, HRESET, SENDUIPI, STUI, TESTUI, UIRET, VPDPBUSD