Svobodný software

For those with reasons sticking to formal Wine stable releases as opposed to the feature-progressing Wine bi-weekly snapshots, Wine 4.0.1 is now the latest and greatest...

Valve issued a new Steam beta release that contains a lot of changes across the board, including Linux...

The lengthy battle of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to using a Git workflow from SVN might be getting closer to finally culminating... Linaro developer Maxim Kuvyrkov has jumped on the task of converting the GCC repository from SVN to Git and did so without much fuss...

The latest in our benchmarking with the new GeForce GTX 1650 is some "fun" tests seeing how its performance compares to that of the GeForce GTX 650 Kepler. Various OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming tests were carried out as well as some compute tests and throughout monitoring the AC power consumption to yield the performance-per-Watt metrics.

When Spectre and Meltdown came to light, there was some frustrations in the BSD community that it took time for them to be briefed and ultimately handling the mitigations for these CPU security vulnerabilities. Fortunately, with the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS, also dubbed "Zombieload") vulnerabilities, the key BSDs have seen punctual patches...

Right now the low-end Allwinner ARM SBC boards featuring a SATA port have been running at a measly 36~45MB/s but with changing around a single line of kernel code, that can jump to 120MB/s...

For those wondering how Intel's new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver is performing relative to various NVIDIA and AMD discrete graphics cards, here are some quick tests of older/lower-end parts...

While formally the X.Org Server aimed to put out a new feature update every six months, in recent years they have been well off that trajectory with not much feature activity going on especially now that GLAMOR / XWayland / xf86-video-modesetting have stabilized and many Linux distributions eyeing Wayland by default. But there is now at least some little bit of interest in what's going into X.Org Server 1.21...

While no flashy features like EXT4's case-insensitive option with Linux 5.2, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) did see a good amount of fixes and other improvements for this new kernel round...

Red Hat is hiring for their open-source graphics driver team...

Intel is running their once internal-only Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) in Washington this week but for a first time they have begun inviting customers and industry stakeholders and others to this annual open-source shindig. We're out here for the very interesting event with Imad Sousou and Raja Koduri talking today and some highly interesting technical talks ahead tomorrow. Here is the initial slew of announcements...

Valve has just released Proton 4.2-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that is used by Steam Play for running Steam Windows games on Linux...

Following today's disclosure of the new MDS vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPUs, a slew of new Linux kernel stable releases have been issued...

We are coming up on the Mesa 19.1 quarterly feature release hopefully by the end of the month while out today is the second release candidate for evaluating this next big update to these OpenGL and Vulkan driver implementations...

Intel just disclosed a new speculative execution side-channel vulnerability in its processors similar to the existing Spectre/L1TF vulnerabilities. This new disclosure is called the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)...

NVIDIA released the 430.14 Linux driver today as their first non-beta driver build in this 430 branch...

Longtime Red Hat developer Hans de Goede who has been responsible for many Linux desktop improvements over the years from laptop support fixes to open-source GPU driver fixes to most recently flicker-free boot has a new area of hacking: taking care of the pain points under Wayland...

Merged today to the mainline Clang compiler front-end is the initial C2x language mode support as what will eventually be the successor to the C18 programming language...

Since the release of the GCC 9 stable compiler suite earlier this month we have begun firing up a number of compiler benchmarks for this annual feature update to the GNU Compiler Collection. For your viewing pleasure today is looking at the performance of GCC 8 against GCC 9 compared to LLVM Clang 8 as the latest release of this friendly open-source compiler competition. This GCC 8 vs. GCC 9 vs. Clang 8 C/C++ compiler benchmarking was done on an Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX high-end desktop/workstation systems.

Intel "Comet Lake" CPUs look like they will be well supported when running on the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel or later...