Svobodný software

It seems to be the season of open-source Solaris operating system updates... In addition to a new OmniOS LTS release for that Illumos-derived platform, OpenIndiana Hipster has issued its newest quarterly update...

Following their success in stripping out the remaining Python 2 bits, the release candidate of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is now available...

It's been a particularly busy start to May for KDE developers...

The Intel Gallium3D OpenGL driver performance is now in good shape for this new open-source Intel Linux GL driver compared to its "classic" Mesa driver, but there are still various other features to be ironed out before this "Iris" driver can become the new default. One of the items now crossed off the list is GPU hang recovery...

While open-source operating system projects derived from the former "OpenSolaris" code now maintained by the Illumos community aren't exactly prolific these days, one of the projects that does continue cranking through and seeing commercial success as well is OmniOS. OmniOS r151030 was released this week in its "Community Edition" flavor with various improvements...

As part of the first week of changes for the Linux 5.2 merge window, a patch series providing some x86 FPU optimizations were merged though there is some concern there could be regressions on older hardware...

At first there was some concern over the practicality and use-cases for this driver, the NULL TTY driver has been merged for the Linux 5.2 kernel as part of the TTY/serial updates...

If you make use of Linux kernel live-patching or even just have CONFIG_LIVEPATCH enabled, when switching to Linux 5.2 and building with GCC 9, the performance may be impacted in select workloads...

The big GDB 8.3 feature release was just announced by Joel Brobecker. This update to the GNU Debugger comes with many improvements and new features for assisting developers...

While many other Linux distributions are still in the process of demoting Python 2 packages out of their main archive / base OS ahead Python 2 being EOL'ed at the start of 2020, OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 has now joined the class of Linux distributions having already succeeded in that tangled effort...

The change in Linux 5.0 that initially broke ZFS On Linux compatibility ends up being pretty nasty for the ZFS encryption performance... A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s...

For those that wait until the first point release before switching over to a new stable series, Linux 5.1.1 is out this morning...

Not only does Intel's Clear Linux distribution offer stellar out of the box performance, but they seem to be making it increasingly user/desktop friendly at this stage. There's been new GUI installer work as well as the launching of their own support forums...

AFS, the Andrew File-System that serves as a distributed file-system and used by the likes of Carnegie Mellon University and has seen ports to different operating systems, can now handle more programs running on top of the file-system like Firefox and GNOME...

Hot off the release of Wine 4.8, Wine-Staging 4.8 has already been released with its hundreds of patches re-based atop this latest upstream Wine code for handling Windows games/applications on Linux and other operating systems...

For those making use of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) for cross-platform libraries common to games/multimedia software, version 3.2.2 is now available with nearly a half year worth of updates...

The -Wimplicit-fallthrough compiler flag has been around since GCC 7 for warning over switch fall-through cases where it could lead to potential bugs / unexpected behavior if the programmer inadvertently forgot to add a "break" statement to a case. The Linux kernel is looking to soon enable this warning by default...

Kaidan is the newest program in the KDE family, which is a Jabber/XMPP client that ultimately hopes to compete with the likes of Telegram...

Last month Intel developers began working on adding BFloat16 support to the open-source/Linux compilers for this new instruction debuting with next-generation Xeon "Cooper Lake" server processors. That support is now squared away for GCC 10, due out next year, and LLVM Clang 9, which will be released this autumn...

Wine 4.8 is now available as the latest bi-weekly snapshot for running Windows programs/games on Linux and other platforms...