Blender 2.90 is out as a huge feature update to this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling solution.

Blender 2.90 comes with many improvements including the likes of:

- Intel's open-source Embree is now used for ray-tracing on CPUs, offering better performance.

- Intel Open Image Denoise is now used more widely.

- NVIDIA OptiX support is now available on all NVIDIA GPUs from Maxwell and newer where as previously it just worked on RTX

Aleksa Sarai of SUSE and Christian Brauner of Canonical presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference with a call for more extensible system calls moving forward in aiming to enhance the Linux user-space API.

The talk was a collection of recommendations -- some of which are already common in the introduction of new system calls -- and new recommendations compared to the traditional "trial and error" approach the kernel has seen to some extent with system calls of the past.

The SUSE and Canonical kernel developers that presented ultimately hope

Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector.

The stalld daemon monitors Linux threads and detects when threads are stalled as a result of CPU starvation. The stalled thread is in turn boosted by stalld by setting the SCHED_DEADLINE policy and then the original policy restored following the boost.

Stalld supports a configurable value when trying to find threads that are ready but have not been granted

In making for easier code re-use among file-systems and allowing a unified implementation to focus on a single code-base for optimizations moving forward, a generic case-folding implementation for Linux file-systems is being prepared for mainline.

EXT4 and F2FS have both supported optional UTF-8 based case-folding support for file/folder names on a per-folder basis going back a year. To date the file-systems have relied upon similar albeit copied implementations of the code while now it

Manjaro Linux developer Tobias Schramm brought to light that only single data rate mode is currently being used for micro SD cards and eMMC storage with Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBCs. But with a two line kernel patch, the double data rate mode can be enabled.

Tobias sent out on the kernel mailing list that both micro SD and eMMC with the Raspberry Pi 4 is running in single data rate mode only. However, the controller and the board circuitry appear to support the double data rate (DDR) mode just fine.

In addition to talking about code/hardware obsolescence from the Linux kernel , prominent upstream Linux kernel developer Arnd Bermann also presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the current SoC landscape and sharing his predictions for ten years down the road.

Bergmann gave a talk in addition to the obsolescence one on the "SoC support lifecycle in the kernel" when talking about changes in SoC/CPU architectures and how that has evolved over time and the Linux kernel embracing the changes while also identifying code that has reached the end of

The Genode OS project is out with its 20.08 version bump that brings some high profile improvements for this open-source operating system framework.

Among the highlights of the newly-released Genode OS 20.08 are:

- The ability to run the Chromium web engine as a native component. Google Chrome/Chromium itself hasn't been brought to Genode OS but the initial Chromium Web Engine user on Genode is the Falkon web browser.

- Improved Qt5 tool-kit integration.

- There

Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test version of the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel.

Causing the most churn this week was the tree-wide conversion of making use of the fallthrough macro . That change itself added more than two thousand instances of the macro. Following that initial pull was a secondary pull request recently merged with some fallout fixes.

Torvalds noted about 5.9-rc3 overall, " But while the fallthrough annotations are some fairly widespread background noise, we've got the usual driver fixes all

At the GNU Tools Track during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat's Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020's.

Given the stature today of Linux and the Unix wars being over, Woodard expresses his views on it could be time to overhaul the dynamic linker/loader and make it much more fitted for today's worlds. Possible areas for improvement