Svobodný software

AMD Mesa lead developer Marek Olšák has landed a set of improvements to the TGSI-to-NIR pass today for Mesa 19.2 to enhance the RadeonSI driver's support for using this intermediate representation...

One month ago we were told that AMD released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners for addressing the systemd boot issue with Ryzen 3000 series processors that stems from an RdRand instruction issue. Finally over the past week we've seen motherboard vendors pushing out BIOS updates for the prominent motherboards and indeed this takes care of the issue...

Gentoo's AArch64/ARM64 support for 64-bit ARM should now be in good shape...

With last week's dramatic EPYC "Rome" launch where AMD has blown past Intel Xeon "Cascadelake" performance in a majority of server benchmarks, helping the successful launch of these Zen 2 server processors has been Intel's repeated delays of 10nm/Icelake CPUs and also the Spectre / Meltdown / Zombieload / Foreshadow mitigations. Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.

We have seen Intel's compiler gurus contributing new enablement patches for Tiger Lake support with GCC 10 due out next year while now they have also landed their initial Tiger Lake support into the LLVM Clang 10 code compiler also due out in H1'2020...

It was just yesterday that Vulkan 1.1.118 was released with two new extensions while now this Monday morning Vulkan 1.1.119 was released as a third extension was accidentally left out of yesterday's weekly revision...

Sway and WLROOTS creator Drew DeVault on top of his several open-source projects has also been working on improving the VR infrastructure support on Wayland as part of contract work for Status.im. The secure communication company is looking to build a Wayland-driven VR workspace but for that the VR headset support on Wayland needs to be improved...

The GNU toolchain crew released today GCC 9.2 as the newest stable release to their compiler stack...

After more than four years in development there is finally the release of Xfce 4.14...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.3 release candidate 4 as the latest weekly test release for this new kernel version...

Another week, another new Vulkan update...

Greg Kroah-Hartman issued the Linux 4.4.189 and Linux 4.9.189 LTS kernels on Sunday morning that address the new Spectre V1 "SWAPGS" variant mitigations...

The Linux 5.4 kernel will deprecate and mark as obsolete the Wireless USB (WUSB) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) subsystems within the kernel...

Fscrypt is the common Linux kernel framework leveraged by the likes of the EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS file-systems for providing native encryption support. While that Fscrypt-based file encryption has been part of the kernel for several releases now, there's been some shortcomings in how the encryption keys are handled but that should be cleared up for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle...

Out this Sunday is the KDE Frameworks 5.61 update that most notable addresses the recently exposed vulnerability to KDE where specially crafted .desktop and .directory files could automatically execute arbitrary code on users' systems...

System76 has been making good strides on their Coreboot support for their hardware and they are now readying a System76 Darter Pro OSFC Edition as their apparent first laptop to ship with Coreboot in place of the proprietary BIOS...

WEV is a new Wayland utility developed by Drew DeVault of Wayland notoriety for his work on the Sway i3-inspired compositor and the WLROOTS library...

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space...

Adding to the changes to find with the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release is a change from Red Hat that has been carried by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora for years...

For more than one year we've been hearing of Clear Linux working on Windows WSL support to allow for this performance-optimized Linux distribution to run within Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux. There isn't an official release yet, but at least now is a third-party installer/script for making it possible to setup such a configuration...