As we approach the end of Q3'2020 there have been 783 original news articles on Phoronix this quarter and another 40 featured reviews / multi-page articles. Here is a look back at what's been keeping readers informed during this turbulent year.

Below is a look at the most popular Phoronix news for Q3'2020 followed by the most popular featured articles for the quarter. If you appreciate the daily original content on Phoronix consider showing your support by joining

Intel's compiler experts in Moscow have been working on OpenCL C 3.0 support for the LLVM Clang compiler front-end.

OpenCL 3.0 allows much greater flexibility in making OpenCL 2.x era features optional. With this on the compiler-side it's not very invasive when already supporting OpenCL 2.x functionality but a matter in part of just making very features optional.

Intel has already been making use of this OpenCL C 3.0 support within their own Clang downstream tree while Anton Zabaznov

The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU.

Adding to the many Panfrost open-source driver accomplishments this year is now support for the G72 as their latest support addition. The Mali G72 has been around since late 2017 and is making use of the second-generation Bifrost architecture. The Mali G72 is used by the likes of

The beta of Fedora 33 is available this morning ahead of the official release expected at the end of October for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

Fedora 33 has been another very busy cycle for this bleeding-edge Linux distribution and you can try out all of the changes with today's Fedora 33 Beta. Fedora Workstation 33 most notably is switching from EXT4 to Btrfs as its default file-system for offering more modern features. Fedora Server and other spins are sticking to their existing defaults.

While yesterday brought the release of Intel's oneAPI 1.0 specification , the interesting news today is that oneAPI support is coming to AMD Radeon graphics cards.

Intel and the Heidelberg University Computing Center are announcing today they are establishing the "oneAPI Academic Center of Excellence." Great for academia, but what's more interesting to the masses that as part of that Intel and the University of Heidelberg are working to add oneAPI support for AMD Radeon GPUs.

As we have previously covered, Codeplay has already been working on

Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don't jump on the Wayland bandwagon.

NetBSD does actually have Wayland support albeit very limited and thus far better off with X11 support until Wayland compositors have better BSD support and other improvements made for benefiting the NetBSD support as well as the likes of FreeBSD.

NetBSD developer Nia Alarie wrote a blog post yesterday outlining that they have the SWC Wayland Compositor packaged

MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple's Metal API.

MoltenVK 1.1 is out with Vulkan 1.1 support by exposing all core Vulkan 1.1 extensions and other relevant changes. There are also a number of other new Vulkan extensions supported by this release like KHR_multiview, KHR_external_semaphore, KHR_external_fence, and others.

Also notable with this

Mesa 20.2 has managed to release just before the end of the the quarter. This Mesa Q3'2020 graphics driver update is coming out about one month behind schedule but the wait is worthwhile given many open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver updates.

There is new GPU support, RADV is using the ACO shader compiler by default, much better LLVMpipe OpenGL support, new Vulkan extensions, and much more.


- ACO is used by default on the RADV Vulkan driver and all-around should