Svobodný software

Legendary processor engineer Jim Keller has resigned from Intel just over two years since he joined the company to much fanfare...

For those making use of GNU's "adns" asynchronous DNS client library, important security updates are out today...

Following last week's big Proton 5.0-8 release, Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 5.0-9 as a quick bug fix release...

Linux enthusiasts have long been after System76 to offer an AMD Ryzen powered laptop and today they announced such in the form of the new Serval WS...

Last week I provided some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Linux on AMD. As has been common across multiple systems particularly with Threadripper, using Linux leads to a ~20% uptick in performance at large over Windows. While at times we have seen similar advantages for Intel CPUs on Linux, with the new Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake processor it is a very competitive race between Windows 10 May 2020 Update and Ubuntu Linux.

While not the long-awaited GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.20 is out today as the newest stable release for this open-source image editor alternative to the likes of the proprietary Photoshop software...

Disclosed back in March was the LVI attack (Load Value Injection) affecting Intel CPUs. Mitigating LVI requires compiler toolchain changes and LLVM 11 merged its LVI mitigation last month that adds a load fence after each instruction that may be vulnerable to this attack, similar to the GNU Assembler changes. Now though LLVM is adding an unoptimized version of their LVI pass...

Martin Peres who is known for his decade plus in the X.Org community for his longstanding work on the open-source Nouveau driver and in recent years working on Intel's open-source graphics driver team has been brewing a new hobby project around generic open-source Linux drivers for FPGAs...

While Intel's CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability dominated the conversation on Tuesday, Arm quietly revealed a new speculative execution vulnerability of its own called Straight Line Speculation...

With Intel supporting Adaptive-Sync/VRR with Gen11+ graphics and these days with effectively only supporting xf86-video-modesetting for X.Org-driven Linux desktops rather than their basically dead xf86-video-intel driver, the Intel open-source Linux developers continue working on plumbing variable refresh rate support into this generic modesetting DDX...

Sent in last week to the Linux 5.8 mainline kernel were all the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates...

The LLVMpipe software OpenGL implementation that recently has seen work on MSAA, tessellation shader support, and other improvements, now has a working on-disk shader cache implementation...

The Linux MTD subsystem that abstracts raw flash devices will allow emulating MLC NANDs as SLC in an attempt to boost reliability...

Mesa 20.1 was released at the end of May while now Mesa 20.1.1 is out as the first point release to this Q2'2020 driver series...

The ACPI-defined Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver will support "boosting" to the optimal performance level with the Linux 5.8 kernel...

Intel has provided more public details today on their hybrid processor efforts, initially with their "Lakefield" CPUs for small form factor devices...

Following yesterday's disclosure of CrossTalk / SRBDS after a nearly two year embargo period for this Special Register Buffer Data Sampling vulnerability, I have been running benchmarks on multiple systems for the past nearly 24 hours. Here are some preliminary data points for both synthetic and real-world workloads on various Intel CPUs before/after mitigating SRBDS with the updated Intel microcode.

The previously reported on Sienna Cichlid support for AMD's RadeonSI OpenGL driver has finished its quick review process and now merged for Mesa 20.2...

On the desktop side for Ubuntu 20.10 one of the changes we have been eager to see is ZFS encryption support on new installations in an easy-to-use manner and extending their existing OpenZFS file-system support. That ZFS encryption support has begun to land...

Jaegeuk Kim has sent in the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...