Back during August Valve reported a 0.89% marketshare for Linux compared to 0.86% in July. But for September it jumped by 0.05% to 0.94%. Given the continually increasing Steam user-base, this is likely the largest the Steam on Linux
Steam On Linux Ticks Closer To 1.0%, AMD CPUs Now Power A Third Of Linux Gaming Systems
Back during August Valve reported a 0.89% marketshare for Linux compared to 0.86% in July. But for September it jumped by 0.05% to 0.94%. Given the continually increasing Steam user-base, this is likely the largest the Steam on Linux
Ubuntu 20.10 Beta Released For Testing
Ubuntu 20.10 is due for its official release on 22 October while the beta serves as the prime opportunity for testing it to avoid any last minute snafus. Ubuntu 20.10 is riding high atop the stable Linux 5.8 kernel
OpenZFS 2.0-RC3 Released With Bug Fixes, Intel QAT Support For Newer Kernels
OpenZFS 2.0 is nearing its official release with support for Linux going back to old 3.10 era kernels while on FreeBSD the code can work on 12.1 through FreeBSD 13-HEAD. OpenZFS 2.0 is a huge update in mainlining the FreeBSD support , Zstd compression support , performance improvements throughout the code-base, persistent L2
PHP 8.0 RC1 Released
PHP 8.0 is continuing to enhance the performance with the introduction of the PHP JIT and other optimizations as a big upgrade over PHP 7.x and now an insanely different beast from the sluggish days of PHP 5.x. PHP 8.0 also brings the JSON support into PHP core rather than an optional extension, improves the PHP GD imaging library, cryptographic message syntax support within PHP OpenSSL, PHP Zip improvements, and
Ghostbusters - Linux 5.10 To Bring Rewritten Spectre Mitigations For 64-bit ARM
Arm Linux developers have been working on " Ghostbusters " as a major rework to the ARM64 mitigation code around Spectre Variant Two and Spectre Variant Four.
The ARM64 Spectre V2 mitigation code was rewritten as it was " pretty unwieldy and hard to maintain. This is largely due to it being written hastily, without much clue as to how things would pan out, and
Another Kernel Optimization Being Worked On That Can Help IO_uring Performance
Jens Axboe, Facebook engineer and maintainer of the Linux block subsystem and lead IO_uring developer, sent out a new optimization today. The optimization is to decouple TASK_WORK TWA_SIGNAL handling from signals .
Axboe explains of the change, " Users of TWA_SIGNAL need to have system calls interrupted and go through a kernel/user transition to ensure they are run. This currently works well from a functional
Dell XPS With Intel Tiger Lake + Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Goes On Sale - Benchmarks Coming
Coming at the same time as the new Dell XPS 9310 with Windows 10 is a Dell XPS Developer Edition update with the same hardware but running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Mesa's Vulkan Software Implementation Now Known as Lavapipe
Vallium merged to mainline back in August for Mesa 20.3 as a still maturing Vulkan software implementation just like LLVMpipe is to OpenGL on CPUs. The name has always been a bit odd considering the similarities to Valium, a prescription drug for calming purposes around anxiety, muscle spasm, etc. But now ahead of the Mesa 20.3
Systemd Startup For KDE Plasma 5.21 Has Helped Uncover Bugs, Other Improvements
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson who was involved in this process of optional startup support via systemd has provided a deep dive on the process. This KDE
Linux 5.9 Regression, NVIDIA RTX 30, GNOME 40 & Microsoft Made For A Fun September
We've made it through Q3 of this wild year and now it's on to October that will surely be very interesting with Tiger Lake hardware coming to market, AMD's RDNA2 and Zen 3 announcements, Linux 5.10'