Svobodný software

A few days back we reported on a Meta engineer uncovering an architectural issue with RDSEED usage on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs. It ended up being found to affect more CPU models than originally anticipated and a new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list would disable RDSEED usage across all AMD Zen 5 processors...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 10.17 is now wine-Staging 10.17 that is carrying 295 extra patches atop the upstream Wine codebase for testing at the leading edge of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux...

LACT 0.8.2 is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this Linux GPU control application. This Rust-based software provides a GUI for controlling AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs under Linux with various monitoring metrics, information reporting, power configuration, thermals configuration, and overclocking with supported hardware...

With plans to release next Tuesday (21 October), KDE developers this week have been putting the finishing touches on this next open-source desktop update. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham says he thinks it's going to be "a pretty darn good release" when it officially debuts...

Following the release of Wine 10.16 with initial NTSYNC support from two weeks ago, Wine 10.17 is now available as the latest development release in working toward Wine 11.0 stable in early 2026...

For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner...

An interesting technical collaboration between AMD and Intel as well as other industry players like Google, Bytedance, Microsoft, MiTAC, HPE, and others is openSFI. The new openSFI "Open Silicon Firmware Interface" project is aiming to work toward vendor-neutral low-level firmware interfaces for more interoperable firmware solutions across vendors...

Due to Intel CPU microcode sizes continuing to get larger and late-loading new CPU microcode onto a running system can lead to (brief) disruptions/downtime while the update is applied, future Intel CPUs are introducing a microcode "staging" feature to reduce that microcode updating downtime. The Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year is set to support the Intel microcode staging feature with capable processors...

With the recent release of Ubuntu 25.10 we have seen some nice performance improvements on the likes of AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake compared to prior Ubuntu releases. But what about ARM? In this article is a look at the Ampere Altra performance between Ubuntu 25.04 and Ubuntu 25.10 using the popular System76 Thelio Astra workstation.

Improvements to the Linux kernel's AES-GCM Galois/Counter Mode crypto block cipher code will yield up to 74% faster performance for AMD Zen 3 processors with the Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year...

In addition to the recent Linux kernel patches out of Intel for Cache Aware Scheduling for better performance, separately, another interesting new patch series was sent out this week for the Linux kernel. The patches rework some low-level Linux kernel memory management code and at least for database workloads the early benchmarks are showing possible 14~18% faster database performance with PostgreSQL...

With Fedora 43 releasing in the coming weeks, Fedora stakeholders are beginning to plot their feature ideas for next year's Fedora 44 release. One of the early F44 feature submissions pending approval is switching /boot on Fedora Cloud images to being a Btrfs file-system subvolume...

One of the early changes merged for the in-development Mesa 26.0 is adding support to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for supporting the low-latency hint supported by the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver...

Ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc2 release on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the week were sent out today. There is the usual assortment of different kernel graphics driver fixes, mostly with the Intel and AMD drivers as usual. In particular a few Intel driver fixes make this week's pull worth mentioning...

Valve's Linux graphics driver team contributions aren't limited to just enhancing the rasterization and ray-tracing graphics performance of the open-source Linux GPU drivers for gaming. Beyond other interesting contributions from that talented group of open-source Linux graphics developers over the years and for other areas like enhancing old GPU hardware support, merged this week for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is a massive improvement to benefit the Llama.cpp AI performance...

Fedora 43 had been planning for an early final target release date of 21 October. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen as a "No-Go" was declared at the Fedora Linux 43 release meeting...

Over the years we have seen various workarounds like disabling RDSEED for select AMD CPUs due to hardware bugs and early on in the Zen days were also some RdRand issues due to different problems. It turns out the newest AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors have a new RDSEED issue...

A Phoronix reader pointed out a bug report from 2015 now getting renewed interest... Linux software RAID via MD RAID, DRBD, LVM RAID, and similar software-based solutions can be broken from user-space around O_DIRECT usage. The issue is that these RAID arrays can be put silently into an inconsistent state across disks...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and GNU Binutils mailing list today is an intriguing message from a longtime x86/x86_64 expert around a "a corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" using some x86 opcodes not used by AMD or Intel processors...

With Linux 6.18 now past the merge window and many new features and changes introduced (https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-618-features), I have begun testing out this kernel on various servers, desktops, and laptops at Phoronix. Linux 6.18 is quite important with expected to become this year's LTS kernel version upon its stable debut in December. Up today is a first look at Linux 6.17 vs. 6.18-rc1 performance using Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids server performance.