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Of Intel's keynote announcements this week kicking off their first public Open-Source Technology Summit, surprisingly not attracting too much attention this week was news of their ModernFW initiative to create a new modular and open-source firmware solution to replace aging legacy code on motherboards...

Yesterday I published some initial MDS/Zombieload mitigation impact benchmarks while coming out still later today is much more data looking at the CPU/system performance impact... But is the gaming performance impaired by this latest set of CPU side-channel vulnerabilities?..

Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript...

While upstream SSH has disabled password logins for the root user as their default configuration the past number of years and that has carried over into being the out-of-the-box behavior for many operating systems, Fedora continues allowing password-based SSH root log-ins by default. But with the next Fedora release they are thinking about changing that default behavior...

The GCC 10 code compiler merged support to begin emulating MMX intrinsics using SSE...

Olof Johansson sent in the SoC updates on Thursday for the Linux 5.2 kernel merge window that is nearing the end. There is new SoC support for this new kernel and a number of new boards also being supported...

Veteran Linux multimedia developer Paul Kocialkowski summed up the current situation this week of many hardware platforms having a general purpose micro-controller running a non-free firmware blob for coordinating the video decoding work. It makes it easier to program with this firmware-based approach but makes the driver less free and now with recent Linux infrastructure improvements could better support dealing with the video hardware itself...

Following last week's big feature update to the DRM graphics drivers, an initial batch of "fixes" has now been merged to the early Linux 5.2 development code for these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...

In addition to DragonFlyBSD seeing MDS "Zombie Load" mitigations this week, the DragonFlyBSD kernel now has better Spectre Variant Two coverage with making use of the GCC compiler support...

While Intel's open-source Linux support is largely stellar and was a big focus of this week's Open-Source Technology Summit in Washington, their FreeBSD support isn't nearly as polished but over the past roughly year and a half they've been establishing a FreeBSD team and working towards feature parity and supporting critical functionality for their customers...

The Free Software Foundation has certified a new batch of hardware for being libre and meeting their "Respect Your Freedom" requirements. This newly-approved hardware for free software enthusiasts includes certifying an USB-to-parallel printer cable in 2019...

The KDE community today rolled out the beta of the Plasma 5.16 desktop upgrade and it's huge...

The default Linux mitigations for the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities (also known as "Zombieload") do incur measurable performance cost out-of-the-box in various workloads. That's even with the default behavior where SMT / Hyper Threading remains on while it becomes increasingly apparent if wanting to fully protect your system HT must be off...

Of Intel's many open-source projects, taking a central role at this year's Intel Open-Source Technology Summit was Clear Linux. Most Intel open-source efforts mentioned during the event point back to Clear Linux in some capacity and at OSTS2019 we finally heard some of the companies that are beginning to make use of Clear Linux...

A few days back I posted a number of Intel OpenCL benchmarks between their former Beignet and new "NEO" Linux compute stacks that was done using a Skylake NUC for the Iris Pro 580 graphics. For those wondering how these two open-source Intel OpenCL implementations compare for the more common UHD Graphics 630, here are some benchmarks using an Intel Core i9 8700K "Coffeelake" processor...

Complementing the recent comparison of Radeon RX 560/570/580 vs. GeForce GTX 1060/1650/1660 Linux Gaming Performance benchmarks, in this article are 102 Linux graphics tests (mostly games) looking more closely at the performance of the sub-$150 GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 570 graphics cards...

While it's just the DeviceTree additions needed to the kernel for enabling the Librem 5 Developer Kit to boot with the mainline kernel, the DT files are up to their twelfth patch revision...

After a successful Kickstarter campaign and honoring those obligations, the Atomic Pi recently hit retail channels (albeit sold out currently) as a $35 Intel Atom powered single board computer to compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi...

Con Kolivas has posted his latest patches that re-base his MuQSS scheduler to the new Linux 5.1 kernel...

For those interested in compiler optimization/tuning with AMD Ryzen Threadripper hardware, here are some follow-up benchmarks to Tuesday's GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ Compiler Performance On AMD Threadripper, Intel Core i9...