On Saturday the ISO/IEC 14882:2020 standards draft was approved as the latest major update to the C++ programming language.

The C++20 approval was unanimous and is a very significant update over C++17, coming a few months later than originally anticipated.

C++20 adds to the language concepts, modules, the "spaceship operator" for three-way comparisons, coroutines, designated initializers, new standard attributes, and much more

Following a summer quest for figuring out a pesky thread issue with Rust, a fix has been merged into the BeOS-inspired Haiku kernel for one less patch to worry about with getting this popular programming language running well.

Developer nielx spent quite a bit of time this summer investigating "failed to join thread: No such process" errors when compiling Cargo and failed test cases.

The issue was resolved in the Haiku kernel by removing a limit on the number of dead threads in a team.

Thus with the latest Haiku kernel

In preparation for "future AMD systems", which is likely AMD EPYC Zen 3 "Milan" server processors, there will be more banks for the Machine Check Exception handling.

Banks for the Machine Check Architecture are a means of organizing subsystems/subevents with their relevant MSRs for detecting/reporting machine errors. Older processor families had only a few banks of registers for machine check support while the current limit in the AMD MCE driver has been 32 banks. With a patch queued in ras/core ahead of Linux 5

While Chrome 86 entered beta with many features , Chrome 87 in development has re-enabled the Wayland+X11 Ozone support as another attempt at improving the Wayland support experience off the single binary.

As of the Chrome/Chromium 87.0.4252.0 dev build, the support has been relanded for using X11 and Ozone and fixes Vulkan tests on Linux with the Skia renderer as well as ANGLE tests on Linux Ozone.

The state of the Ozone platform support continues

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) is out with a new feature release with this daemon continuing to see new usage and possibly on Ubuntu moving forward.

With IWD 1.9 there has been work most notably on sorting out the APIs around WiFi Display support this is around the WFD / Miracast standards. Included with IWD 1.9 is a sample/test app using GStreamer with a WiFI Display device making use of the new IWD interface.

IWD 1.9 besides the WiFi Display client API also brings support

KDE has kicked off the new month with some interesting improvements.

KDE developer Nate Graham continues in his weekly summaries highlighting the improvements to this open-source desktop environment. Among the strides made this week include:

- Annotations support within Spectacle.

- The System Settings Bluetooth pages have been merged into a new QML-based page.

- Better speed and performance of generating thumbnail previews for files and folders. This Dolphin 20.12 improvement is made by avoiding extra work really not needed for thumbnail creation.

- Konsole

Less than one year after joining NUVIA as VP of Software, longtime Linux proponent Jon Masters is leaving the company and returning to his previous position at Red Hat.

Jon Masters leaving Red Hat to take the prominent role at ARM server vendor NUVIA made waves last November that also happened when the company announced their series A funding round. Prior to joining NUVIA, Masters had been the Chief Arm Architect and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat. He has been a longtime ARM Linux advocate for years.

Coming as much surprise, Jon announced

Oracle has put out another VirtualBox 6.1 point release though making it notable this time around is support for the upstream Linux 5.8 kernel.

Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1.14 brings host/guest support for the Linux 5.8 stable kernel, which is important that besides being the latest upstream is also what is to be found in the likes of Ubuntu 20.10 this autumn. VirtualBox 6.1.14 also has GUI fixes, an HDA emulation regression fix, fixes

PipeWire as the Red Hat led project for better audio/video stream management server on the Linux desktop is getting into increasingly great shape. This forward-looking solution that handles PulseAudio/JACK use-cases as well as pleasant integration with the likes of Wayland and Flatpak is ready to take on more user testing.

PipeWire lead developer Wim Taymans feels that the code is at a state where "PulseAudio, JACK and ALSA backends being usable if not 100% feature complete yet." It's in good enough