Svobodný software

Being merged into the LLVM code-base this Saturday is JITLink, a just-in-time linker for parsing object files and letting their contents run in a target process...

Not only is the longtime Lima DRM driver for Arm Mali 400/450 graphics set to finally premiere with the Linux 5.2 kernel, but the Panfrost DRM driver is also being mainlined for the newer Mali graphics hardware...

A new subsystem queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 5.2 cycle is the Fieldbus Subsystem, which is initially being added to the staging area of the kernel...

As we've been expecting from NVIDIA's recent DXR ray-tracing support back-ported to Pascal/Volta GPUs, there's now a NVIDIA Linux driver beta that offers VK_NV_ray_tracing for pre-Turing graphics processors...

Going back to the late Linux 2.6 kernel days has been the CONFIG_DMESG_RESTRICT (or for the past number of years, renamed to CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT) Kconfig option to restrict access to dmesg in the name of security and not allowing unprivileged users from accessing this system log. While it's been brought up from time to time, Linux distributions are still generally allowing any user access to dmesg even though it may contain information that could help bad actors exploit the system...

While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston...

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality...

While there were the recent X.Org Foundation board elections, a do-over was needed as their new custom-written voting software wasn't properly recording votes... So here's now your reminder to re-vote in these X.Org elections...

Feature work on DRM-Next for the Linux 5.2 kernel cycle is winding down while today AMD has sent in what could be their last round of AMDGPU feature updates for this next kernel release...

Mesa 19.1 is due to be released at the end of May and for that to be the feature freeze is in two weeks followed by the weekly release candidates. With the feature development ending soon for this next quarterly Mesa release, the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers in particular have been quite busy on their remaining feature work...

While the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is needed for targeting the Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens, and IoT, The Qt Company is thinking about gutting out their UWP support in the big Qt 6 tool-kit update...

Last year FreeBSD developers decided to re-base their ZFS file-system code based on the "ZFS On Linux" port rather than the Illumos source tree where they originally had been acquiring the support for this BSD. There's now FreeBSD 12 and FreeBSD 13/Head images available for testing of this re-worked ZFS file-system support...

Back during the BeOS days of the 90's, NVM Express solid-state storage obviously wasn't a thing but the open-source Haiku OS inspired by it now has an NVMe driver...

The Virtual I/O Device standard has christened its VIRTIO 1.1 specification this month. This is the virtualization standard around network/storage/graphics/other-hardware in mind for cross-hypervisor compatibility...

Following last month's Proton 4.2 for Steam Play that is derived from Wine 4.2 with many patches applied, Proton 4.2-3 has been released for the latest Windows gaming on Linux experience ahead of any Easter weekend gaming time...

For those wondering about Intel's MKL-DNN "Math Kernel Library for Deep Neural Networks" performance on Cascade Lake, here are some reference benchmarks using the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 setup including when using the GCC 9 compiler for building this Intel open-source library and employing the "cascadelake" compiler tuning...

With Ubuntu 19.04 out the door, it's time to kick off Ubuntu 19.10 as the next six-month installment of Ubuntu Linux and the last before Ubuntu 20.04 as the next LTS release...

Mozilla WebThings is what was formerly known as "Project Things" while serving as an experiment around a platform for IoT devices on the web...

KDE Applications 19.04 is now officially out as the first update of 2019 for this collection of prominent KDE desktop programs...

The Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" has been officially released as the latest non-LTS, six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux...