Queued today into the block subsystem's "-next" area ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month are some MD RAID enhancements.

In particular, thanks to Red Hat's Xiao Ni is improved RAID10 discard request handling. The change with a set of five SSDs in a RAID10 array on a test system dropped the mkfs.xfs time for creating an XFS file-system taking 4 minutes 39 seconds to less than 1 second... Quite a noticeable

Ahead of next month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release and the new OpenBenchmarking.org , the milestone was met this week of having 600 different test profiles (benchmarks) available for automated execution via our open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software.

While only a few tests require new Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 specific functionality and thus not available on older PTS releases, the vast majority are available assuming you have an Internet connection and run phoronix-test-suite openbenchmarking-refresh

For a while now Oracle engineers and others have been working on Trenchboot as a means of secure launch/boot support when paired with the likes of Intel TXT and AMD SKINIT for trusted execution and configuring each piece of the software boot chain for trusted/secure handling. The latest kernel patches have been sent out for review for secure launching of the kernel.

Earlier this year Oracle engineers sent out Linux kernel patches for Trenchboot while on Thursday the newest work surfaced.

These patches provide for Trenchboot secure dynamic launching of the Linux kernel

Oracle's GraalVM has seen language support well outside of Java/OpenJDK from Ruby to WebAssembly to R and Python. The newest language seeing an experimental implementation built atop GraalVM is PHP.

Andrin Bertschi for his university thesis has been implementing PHP atop the GraalVM. A sizable subset of the PHP 7.4 programming language is implemented by this GraalPHP compiler and runtime.

Benchmark results of GraalPHP have been very promising against PHP 7 and other alternatives, including the upcoming PHP 8 with its own official JIT compiler:

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains , more details are now available.

This Mesa OpenGL software implementation over Vulkan has been seeing more performance optimizations by developer Mike Blumenkrantz following his remarkable work on getting OpenGL 4.6 up and running. He's been making a number of optimizations recently while last week's note of a "50~100%" improvement was certainly enticing albeit left wondering if it was just

After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week.

Fedora 33 is ready to make its beta debut next week for increasing the testing of this half-year update to the Red Hat sponsored distribution.

Ben Cotton announced on Thursday that it's a "GO" for releasing Fedora 33 Beta next week with the current images in good shape and no blocker bugs pending.

The schedule puts the

Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10 .

Besides all of the Intel (i915) DRM kernel graphics driver improvements coming for Linux 5.10 some of which explicitly benefit Gen12/Xe and the DG1 discrete graphics card, the sound subsystem updates for this next kernel cycle are bringing up the audio support.

Queued into sound-next for Linux 5.10 are the DG1 PCI and HDMI

It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling.

AMD is hiring another 3D Driver Development Engineer but what makes this job posting of interest is they are specifically looking for a Rust developer. Yes, the increasingly popular programming language focused on memory safety and concurrency.

The job posting specifically mentions among the responsibilities are " Contribute to the development of new tooling with Rust and 3D graphics drivers with C++ ."

The post doesn't detail their