GCC 10 Adds ARMv8.6-A Targeting, BFloat16 + i8MM Options
Building on earlier GCC commits for Arm's BFloat16 (BF16) support and other new extensions, a late change landing for GCC 10 is the command line options for targeting the ARMv8.6-A architecture and optionally toggling i8mm and BF16 extensions...
Mesa Development Activity Was Up By ~20% In 2019, Just Under 3 Million Lines Of Code
Mesa3D as principally the collection of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is up to 2,996,270 lines of code (and documentation / associated scripts) within its Git tree! That should put it over the three million mark very soon while the Git activity was up by about 20% in 2019...
Fedora 32 Planning To Make Use Of systemd's sysusers.d For Declaring New Users
Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team...
Dell Finally Rolls Out XPS 13 Developer Edition With Ice Lake, Fingerprint Reader
Up to now the most recent Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux has been using Comet Lake processors while now the 10th Generation XPS 13 Developer Edition has been announced with Ice Lake processors...
Coreboot Seeing Tigerlake + Jasperlake Activity, Experimental Razer Icelake Laptop Support
Building upon Coreboot Icelake support that has been coming together recently is now the initial Intel support for Jasperlake and Tigerlake. Additionally, when it comes to the Icelake support, there is experimental/work-in-progress support for the Icelake-powered Razer Blade Stealth laptop...
More Improvements Queued For The Smaller DRM Drivers In Linux 5.6
The first batch for 2020 of DRM-Misc updates have been sent to DRM-Next of the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers and other core / user-space API changes to our favorite subsystem...
Systemd Is Approaching 1.3 Million Lines While Poettering Lost Top Contributor Spot For 2019
As of New Year's morning, systemd's Git tree was at 1,273,896 lines spread across 3,522 commits built up over 42,700+ commits from around 1,500 different authors...
KDE's Kate Text Editor Seeing LSP Improvements For Better Code Support
With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support...
Bonsai Is A New Effort For GNOME-Focused Multi-Device Cloud/Synchronization
Christian Hergert of Red Hat who is known for his work on the GNOME Builder IDE has recently been hacking on a new project called Bonsai that is designed as a GNOME-focused multi-device synchronization service akin to a personal cloud...
The Linux Kernel's Scheduler Apparently Causing Issues For Google Stadia Game Developers
Among the issues that game developers have been facing in bringing their games to Linux for Google's Stadia cloud gaming service apparently stem from kernel scheduler issues. We've known the Linux kernel scheduler could use some improvements and independent developers like Con Kolivas with BFS / MuQSS have pushed for such, but hopefully in 2020 we'll see some real action...