GStreamer 1.18 is gearing up for release in the very near future while for right now a release candidate is available for testing this widely-used open-source multimedia framework.

GStreamer 1.18 finally does away with the Autotools build system in favor of Meson, Cerbero is supported as a meta build system for platforms like Windows/Android/macOS/iOS, a new gst-tester test utility, and a wide variety of other core improvements. The complete release notes / concise change-log for

The Linux IO_uring interface for driving some major efficiency improvements in the Linux I/O stack is really screaming when paired with Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon server platforms and the Intel Gen2 "Alder Stream" Optane solid-state drives.

Jens Axboe of Facebook who serves as the Linux kernel's block subsystem maintainer for all the storage code and also the mastermind behind IO_uring shared some latest figures for IO_uring. In these latest IO_uring reference figures he is using the

Along with this week marking the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 , the oneAPI Data Parallel C++ compiler has seen its newest tagged release.

The Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler is the company's LLVM-based compiler around their Data Parallel C++ initiative for oneAPI built atop Khronos' SYCL single source programming standard and ISO C++. With the oneAPI DPC++ Compiler 2020-08 release one of the most significant additions is the introduction of the Intel Explicit SIMD

Coming as a surprise last week was word of Paragon Software wanting to mainline their NTFS read-write driver as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS Linux kernel driver. An updated patch series for that much improved NTFS Linux kernel driver is now available.

As explained last week, the existing NTFS kernel driver for Linux is primarily read-only and lacks much functionality. There is also the NTFS-3G driver that is more common for Linux users needing NTFS support, but that is FUSE-based. Paragon meanwhile is

AMD engineers responsible for their official Vulkan driver code-base have issued their first updated open-source snapshot in two weeks for AMDVLK fans.

AMDVLK 2020.Q3.4 is the new release and is updated for the Vulkan API version 1.2.150 while the newest extension supported by the driver is VK_EXT_image_robustness. The image robustness extension has been around since last month with Vulkan 1.2.148 and deals with the handling of out-

With Linux 5.9 comes the ability to compress the Linux kernel image / initrd with Zstd for yielding faster boot speeds but at a compression ratio between Gzip and XZ/LZMA. Being proposed next with the widespread adoption of Facebook's Zstd is compressing the kernel microcode/firmware files.

A patch was sent out today to allow supporting Zstd-compressed firmware files by the Linux kernel. This in turn would basically allow the Zstandard compression algorithm to be used not only for kernel/initrd image compression but also for the

The UBports' Ubuntu Touch crew has been focusing a lot lately on improving their support for the popular, budget-friendly PineTab tablet and PinePhone smartphone. The next OTA release will bring more improvements for fans of these PINE Allwinner-powered devices.

The UBports team relayed a number of PINE improvements they have been working on including:

- Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 will bring working OpenGL rendering support on the PinePhone. At the moment Ubuntu Touch on this Allwinner budget smartphone is using software acceleration, which is brutal, but

For the past two summers student developer Giuliano Belinassi has been working under Google Summer of Code in working to address GCC parallelization bottlenecks and ultimately a goal of allowing single source files to be split up for compilation in parallel by GCC. In particular, being able to split the compilation of large source files across multiple CPU cores. The latest patches on this "-fparallel-jobs=" was sent out today as we approach the end of GSoC 2020.

The GCC parallelization effort has been a success and shown

The Chinese-developed C-SKY CPU architecture for 32-bit SoCs and embedded processors could soon see an LLVM back-end to complement the C-SKY support found since GCC 9 .

C-SKY aims to be a "high-performance low-power" 32-bit processor design geared for embedded systems. Initial C-SKY support for the Linux kernel was upstreamed back in Linux 4.20 .