Svobodný software

Godot as one of the most successful open-source game engine projects is preparing for its Godot 4.0 Beta 1 milestone and as part of that will begin the feature freeze for this major engine update...

Intel has posted a new open-source Linux VPU driver today... Not Video Processing Unit, but it's for a Versatile Processing Unit coming with 14th Gen Core processors...

Linux 5.19 is set to be released this weekend, so here is a reminder about some of the big ticket items to find in this summer 2022 kernel release...

Since the disclosure of Retbleed earlier this month as the newest CPU security vulnerability around speculative execution, I've posted some Intel/AMD benchmarks looking at the mitigation cost for the affected older generations of processors. Last week I also looked at the accumulated CPU mitigation cost on AMD Zen 1. Today is a similar comparison over on the Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" side with looking at the cost of just the Retbleed mitigations and then the overall CPU mitigation cost when toggling all of the various vulnerabilities with the "mitigations=off" flag.

With Intel DG2/Alchemist getting settled, the DRM-Next cutoff for v5.20 kernel material having passed, and Raptor Lake enablement also appearing to be in good shape given the little change over Alder Lake, Intel open-source engineers have begun working more on Meteor Lake driver support that will succeed Raptor Lake next year...

The newest AMD Linux optimization patch for the kernel aims to introduce a cool down period for the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) after each I2C transaction between the x86 CPU and the PSP...

Canonical engineers continue working on their Steam Snap for making that confined version of Valve's Linux game client viable and useful to Ubuntu gamers...

Following this month's approval by the steering committee of GCC Rust as a compiler front-end for the Rust programming language, the first formal series has been sent out for review...

Intel today confirmed they are moving their 6th to 10th Gen Intel Processor Graphics (basically all the "Gen9" graphics hardware going back to the Skylake days) to their legacy support model. This primarily impacts Windows but longer-term may have some implications for Linux users...

QEMU 7.1 is working its way toward release as the next major version of this open-source processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source virtualization stack...

AMD's GPUOpen group today announced the availability of the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer as their latest offering in the Radeon Developer Tool Suite...

While the cutoff of new feature work to queue in DRM-Next for the next kernel cycle usually ends around the "-rc6" time of the current cycle, AMD has submitted a few last minute items for Linux 5.20 ahead of its merge window opening next week...

Mesa 22.2 is about to be branched and enter its feature freeze while fortunately expanded Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support has made it in time! Remaining DG2/Alchemist PCI IDs are now enabled for Mesa 22.2 and intended to function with Linux 5.20+ for Intel's forthcoming desktop graphics cards...

Increase use of Windows BitLocker for full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 is causing more challenges by Linux distributions for supporting convenient dual boot functionality for those wishing to keep both Windows and Linux on the same systems...

In addition to new kernel code and updated firmware fixing a power management issue for Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" where C1 and C1E power states were mutually exclusive, another important Sapphire Rapids power management improvement is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.20 kernel cycle...

While AMD and Intel are busy with big graphics driver changes for each new version of the Linux kernel, the open-source NVIDIA "Novueau" kernel driver that is largely just worked on by Red Hat employees is just stumbling along. NVIDIA in May announced they are transitioning to an open-source kernel driver approach, but that current kernel driver is not in shape for upstreaming and due to the heavy use of the GPU System Processor (GSP) that source release hasn't been a huge help yet for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. With the upcoming Linux 5.20, Nouveau has some display patches...

LLVM 15.0 and its sub-projects like the Clang compiler are now under a feature freeze and branched from the main code-base ahead of the stable 15.0 release in September...

The OpenMandriva crew behind this long ago Mandriva/Mandrake-derived distribution announced their Lx ROME technical preview release as their rolling release version of the operating system...

Last month KDE Plasma 5.25 released as the newest feature release to this Qt-based open-source desktop environment. Unfortunately for FreeBSD desktop users, those using KDE will be stuck for a while longer on Plasma 5.24 due to missing security infrastructure...

There are a few Fedora Spins/Labs versions at risk of being removed with Fedora 37 this autumn unless new maintainers step up...