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Hot off yesterday's release of Wine 5.4 with Unicode 13 and text drawing for D3DX9, Wine-Staging 5.4 is now available with more than 850 patches on top of it...

Any regular Phoronix reader should already be quite familiar with SVT-AV1 and the other open-source Scalable Video Technology encoders considering how much we have been benchmarking them -- months before even before they were officially announced. Netflix, which has been working on SVT-AV1 in conjunction with Intel, has an interesting write-up for some weekend reading on the state of this open-source AV1 encoder/decoder...

Microsoft announced in their forthcoming Windows 10 Version 2004 update that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be entering general availability status...

Fedora 32 Beta was deemed unready for release on Thursday during the initial Go/No-Go meeting but after reconvening twenty-four hours later the remaining blocker bugs were addressed...

Moving forward it will hopefully become easier updating NVMe solid-state drive device firmware under Linux...

Wine 5.4 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it comes with a number of improvements...

Announced at the end of last year was Radeon Open Compute 3.0 with the new "AOMP" compiler. Today a new version of AOMP has been released for OpenMP offloading support to AMD Radeon GPUs...

LLVM 10.0-RC3 was released last week as what was supposed to be the last release candidate of the cycle after being challenged by delays already. However, last minute issues with RC3 has led to LLVM 10.0-RC4 coming out today...

A rather simple improvement to the Linux CFS scheduler's load balancing code appears to have measurable benefits with helping to more quickly spread the task utilization across the system...

A four year old Intel Linux display driver bug around corruption issues when trying to drive tiled displays (namely 5K+ setups with dual DisplayPort connections) on Intel "Gen9" graphics hardware for Skylake up until Icelake could soon be marked as resolved...

Intel Compute Runtime 20.10.16087 was released today as their latest weekly-ish tagged update to this open-source compute runtime for empowering their graphics hardware on Linux with OpenCL and oneAPI support...

Currently the Linux kernel SECCOMP secure computing mode force-enables Spectre protections, which comes with obvious performance implications. When force-enabled, however, processes can't opt-out of the protection if they are not at risk to the likes of Spectre V4 "Speculative Store Bypass" issues. But a simple change being proposed would let such processes opt out if desired...

2020 could be the year we see the Vulkan API seeing more adoption on the desktop outside of games. We are already looking forward to LibreOffice 7.0 with Vulkan rendering support coming out later this summer while the next FFmpeg release also has Vulkan support lined up...

There have not been many AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver releases this quarter, but out today in any case is AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 as their newest update to this official open-source Vulkan driver derived in part from shared sources with the AMD Vulkan Windows driver...

One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since...

Feature work of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver work for Linux 5.7 is winding down now that Linux 5.6 is almost to its sixth release candidate this weekend, but sent in this week by AMD were a few more AMDGPU items though mostly amounting to fixes for their graphics driver...

In addition to WebAssembly's growing presence outside of the web browser thanks to various desktop run-times and interesting use-cases, WebAssembly is also popping up in other areas. Google has been working on WebAssembly support for extensions within network proxies typically reserved for C/C++ or the likes of Lua scripts...

On Tuesday the Load Value Injection (LVI) attack was disclosed by Intel and security researchers as a new class of transient-execution attacks and could lead to injecting data into a victim program and in turn stealing data, including from within SGX enclaves. While Intel has publicly stated they don't believe the LVI attack to be practical, one of their open-source compiler wizards did go ahead and add mitigation options to the GNU Assembler as part of the GCC toolchain. Here are benchmarks showing the performance impact of enabling those new LVI mitigation options and the significant impact they can cause on run-time performance in real-world workloads.

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye...

We continue to see bits here and there of AMD Family 19h / Zen 3 support coming together for the mainline Linux kernel...