Phoronix

In addition to Linux 5.10 supporting SEV-ES as the "encrypted state" for AMD EPYC's Secure Encrypted Virtualization, this kernel is also adding Secure Nested Paging (SNP) support to the AMD IOMMU driver as part of their next-generation SEV-SNP security...

The direct rendering manager (DRM) driver updates were sent in overnight for the ongoing Linux 5.10 merge window with a range of improvements for these graphics/display drivers and as usual the Intel and AMD Radeon driver churn is particularly heavy...

Not only is Btrfs seeing notable improvements with the in-development Linux 5.10 kernel but the XFS file-system also has some prominent changes of its own...

As it's been a while since running a fresh Linux distribution comparison with Intel's Clear Linux platform and given all the autumn distribution updates inbound, here is a fresh look at the rolling-release Clear Linux up against a snapshot of Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora Workstation 33 Beta, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20200929, Arch-based Endeavour OS, and Debian Testing from the start of October.

If 2020 couldn't get more peculiar, today the SDL2 project mainlined support for the OS/2 operating system...

Mesa 20.2 officially released at the end of September as the Q3'2020 open-source driver stack update providing open-source OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan support for much of the graphics hardware on the market. For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading, that milestone was reached today...

The Linux kernel's fundamental printk() function for printing messages at various log levels for then accessing via the likes of dmesg is beginning to see a significant overhaul...

Intel today is revealing a few details concerning upcoming Intel 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors...

While the LibreOffice fork is much more popular than OpenOffice these days, the Apache Software Foundation does continue maintaining the OpenOffice codebase born out of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice...

The UBports community that continues advancing the Ubuntu Touch mobile platform has been working on improvements to its installer...

Following this month's Intel programming reference manual update disclosing a number of new instruction set extensions, Intel's compiler engineers have gone public with patches for implementing some of these forthcoming CPU features...

The kernel power management changes have been sent in for Linux 5.10 with a few items worth pointing out from faster hibernation to fixing power management handling for AMD laptops with both integrated and discrete graphics...

The media subsystem of the Linux kernel is seeing a number of changes with the in-development Linux 5.10...

While the mainline Linux kernel for quite a while now has supported AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization for EPYC processors as a means of better securing guest virtual machines (VMs) and public clouds with hardware memory encryption and using one key per VM to not only protect between guests but also the hypervisor, with Linux 5.10 comes AMD SEV-ES as another step forward for secure virtualization on AMD EPYC...

Good news for Raspberry Pi 4 users... The V3DV Vulkan driver developed over the past year for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware with an emphasis on the Raspberry Pi 4 support is now mainlined in Mesa 20.3!..

WireGuard has long been available as an app on the Google Play store for those wishing to use this cross-platform, open-source secure VPN tunnel solution on Google's mobile operating system. But for Android 12 it appears there will be a form of official support...

CodeWeavers as the main contributor to the Wine code-base and employing many of the key developers thanks to the development of their Linux and macOS CrossOver software is working on a rebrand and promotion of their consulting services...

Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now officially available as the latest major feature release for our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software that now has more than six hundred tests/benchmarks available for fully-automated testing. With Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 also comes a significant overhaul to OpenBenchmarking.org and its biggest since its debut back in 2011 alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0.

It's been a while since having any major news to report on the once promising mobile Linux software platform Sailfish OS from Finnish vendor Jolla, but today they issued a big update in the form of "Pallas-Yllästunturi" or more easily known as Sailfish OS 3.4...

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment...