Svobodný software

With the new security mitigation for the "Native BHI" Spectre vulnerability affecting even the recent Intel processors, a number of Phoronix readers have been curious about the performance impact of the mitigation. Over the past week I've been running some benchmarks on recent Intel CPUs to better look into any performance implications...

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices...

The Bcachefs fixes continue to come in on the heavier side for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel...

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta is out today for this popular community-oriented Linux distribution derived from upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Besides pulling in the RHEL 9.4 Beta changes, AlmaLinux 9.4 also restores hardware support for some devices that was deprecated by upstream RHEL...

openSUSE's Leap Micro OS that caters to containerized and virtualized workloads by providing a lightweight and reliable foundation is embarking on its next major release. The openSUSE Leap Micro 6.0 operating system is now available in alpha form...

Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format...

Continuing a trend worked on in recent Fedora Linux releases and more broadly in the open-source ecosystem at large for securing the software supply chain and ensuring unaltered binaries, Fedora 41 is aiming to ensure more reproducible package builds...

Ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement, the Firefox 125.0 release binaries have been uploaded to the Mozilla mirror this morning. Firefox 125.0 brings a number of new features and developer additions -- more so than we've seen recently from the monthly Firefox releases...

The Rust-based Servo web layout engine started by Mozilla that is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation and worked on by several different organizations is eyeing modularity support for its JavaScript integration. Currently Servo is closely tied to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine but with a modularity push could see other options supported...

Xiph.Org has released RNNoise 0.2 as the recurrent neural network for audio noise reduction. This library leverages a neural network model for enhancing real-time noise suppression...

Archinstall 2.8 is out today as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it much faster deploying this popular Linux distribution...

FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines...

For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory "XDG_BASE_DIR" specification...

As expected the Linux 6.9-rc4 test kernel is out today as Linux 6.9 works its way toward release by mid-May...

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux...

AMD on Saturday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics driver feature patches ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle...

The OpenJPH project that provides an open-source implementation of JPEG-2000 Part 15 for High Throughput J2K (HTJ2K) / JPH support is working on extending its abilities to handle low-latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 images and other capabilities...

Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce "LibGodot" to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps...

OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux...

The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week's "x86/urgent" material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes...