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IBM developers and others continue exploring the potential for address space isolation in the Linux kernel to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data in attacks like L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF), MDS, and other vulnerabilities. Though this does increase the complexity of the kernel code and the performance hit is still to be evaluated...

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle...

In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles...

With the C++17 support in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) already being quite mature for about two releases/years, when the GCC 11 development cycle opens they are looking at enabling their GNU dialect of C++17 to be the default standard when compiling C++ code...

Along with Intel sending in their last feature pull to DRM-Next for Linux 5.5, AMD has done the same in sending their lingering AMDGPU feature work for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window...

The Rust-written "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues working on better performance potential with recent Intel/AMD CPUs...

Fresh off last night's Wine 4.19 uncorking, Wine-Staging 4.19 is out as the experimental blend of Wine with more than 800 patches for experimental/testing patches atop the upstream code-base for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

With the start of a new month we are always eager to see what Valve reports via their "Steam Survey" for Linux usage (among other stats) for the month prior. The October 2019 numbers are now published but they don't indicate any Linux change in marketshare but with some odd indications...

Wine 4.19 is out today as the project's first development release for November and as we get quite close to the feature freeze / RC period for Wine 5.0 that will be out in early 2020...

With Qt 6.0 planned for release in late 2020, KDE developers are thinking about the eventual KDE Frameworks 6.0 for when they plan to transition to the evolutionary Qt 6 tool-kit. The first of likely several developer sprints around KDE Frameworks 6 will be happening already in late November...

Thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is another optimization to GNOME's Mutter around XWayland full-screen gaming...

The open-source vkBasalt project is the independent effort implementing AMD Radeon Image Sharpening / Contrast Adaptive Sharpening technique as a Vulkan post-processing layer that can be used regardless of the (Vulkan-powered) game. With vkBasalt 0.1 also now comes the ability to apply FXAA...

During October on Phoronix there were 287 original news articles and 27 featured-length Linux hardware reviews / benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware happenings and other open-source/Linux news for the past month...

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle...

NVIDIA's Nitin Gupta continues working on proactive compaction for the Linux kernel's memory management code...

MidnightBSD is one of the easy-to-use, desktop-focused BSDs that makes it easy to run GNOME and other desktops like Lumina atop its FreeBSD base. MidnightBSD 1.2 was released on Halloween as an update providing updates to its base system and various fixes...

Dell has been offering the Dell XPS 7390 in "Developer Edition" form with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for this newest XPS generation using 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs while now they have added more hardware configuration options...

Following last week's release of Chrome 78, Google today promoted Chrome 79 to their beta channel...

While we long to finally see GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.14 is out as the newest stable update for this leading open-source image manipulation program...

With Mesa 19.3 having been branched yesterday, hitting Git master today as an early change for Mesa 20.0 is an overhaul to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver's buffer object (BO) allocation code...