Svobodný software

Sent out today was the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening around early October. There are a number of smaller DRM graphics driver improvements ready as well as continued work around the accelerator "accel" drivers for the increasing number of NPUs in devices...

Next year's LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite is set to better handle documents with restricted embedded fonts. This is for dealing with situations where fonts may have restricted licensing rights and where up to now LibreOffice Writer simply hasn't dealt with them correctly...

Tbe BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has continued in advancing this open-source platform with more fixes and other enhancements. The project published its July recap to outline the interesting changes made...

A change queued in drm-misc-next for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel cycle later this year is promoting the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support to be using the GSP firmware by default. This reflects the reality that using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware with Turing and Ampere GPUs should provide a better experience than the older firmware alternative with Nouveau...

V informatice existuje několik oblastí, ve kterých je nutné používat generátory náhodných nebo alespoň pseudonáhodných hodnot. Moderní procesory s architekturou x86–64 pro tento účel nabízí instrukce RDRAND a RDSEED.

SR-IOV for virtualization with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver will only be supported on the Arc Pro products and -- unfortunately -- not the consumer Arc B-Series graphics cards...

While it looked like Linux 6.17 was going to be a good baseline for support with upcoming Intel Panther Lake powered laptops given that this next kernel release ships with the Xe3 graphics enabled by default and other bits coming together, it looks like there is at least one late item only being presented today in patch form: a new "SoC Power Slider" feature as part of the Intel thermal driver for this new feature of Panther Lake SoCs...

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window was an optimization geared for ARM64 that could have a "16x reduction" in the number of calls. Unfortunately that commit ended up causing a rather significant regression for some systems that has now been addressed...

Google engineers today introduced KFuzzTest as a new lightweight framework for in-kernel fuzz targets for internal kernel functions. KFuzzTest aims to make it easier to exercise Linux kernel code paths that are difficult to do from the system call boundary...

A new version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler "ISPC" was just published for supporting that C programming language variant optimized for single program. multiple data (SPMD) programming that is optimized for Intel's various hardware offerings. While catering to Intel hardware, ISPC 1.28 notably adds new AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processor targets...

The IDXD Linux kernel driver used for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) support on recent Xeon processors is being cleaned up for some "not so happy code paths" after an Intel engineer uncovered memory leaks and other troubles with the open-source driver code...

It was nearly one year ago in the Linux 6.13 kernel that the ReiserFS file-system was dropped from the mainline kernel after having been deprecated in 2022. That dropped 32.8k lines of code from the Linux kernel but some documentation remnants of ReiserFS were mistakenly left in but now in the process of dropping those remnants for the defunct file-system...

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library release continues to get more exciting almost by the day. The newest feature being squeezed into this next release is a Whisper audio filter for making use of OpenAI's Whisper model for providing automatic speech recognition / transcription capabilities...

Last week Microsoft released new versions of WSL2 for a yet-to-be-public security vulnerability affecting their Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 implementation. Those details around CVE-2025-53788 are now public for this vulnerability that could lead to elevation of privileges...

The xf86-input-mouse driver for mouse support when using the X.Orrg Server on operating systems like the BSDs, Illumos, GNU Hurd, and Solaris is out with a rare update...

Following the discussion over potentially obsoleting/deprecating the Itanium IA-64 support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), developers are discussing similar treatment for some of the other poorly-maintained CPU ports...

Go 1.25 is out today as the newest half-year update to this popular programming language. What I find most exciting with Go 1.25 is the new experimental garbage collector yielding 10~40% reduction in overhead...

Sonda do světa otevřeného softwaru. Dnes si upravíme fotky v RAW formátu, vytvoříme si zástupce přenosných aplikací, změníme si vzhled GTK aplikací a prozkoumáme sítě v okolí.

Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%...

This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities...