Phoronix

This weekend we reported on how injecting ACPI tables could lead to bypassing Linux's lockdown / UEFI Secure Boot protections and let attackers load unsigned kernel modules. That earlier issue was found on a patched version of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS kernel while now a similar attack vector has been discovered on the mainline Linux kernel...

Entangle 3.0 has been released as the newest feature update to this software for controlling your DSLR camera under Linux with tethered shooting capabilities...

The Corsair Commander Pro is a controller that offers six 4-pin fan ports with PWM control, two RGB LED channels for RGB LED light strips and fans, and four thermistor inputs. This thermal/cooling/lighting controller is seeing Linux support via a third-party driver...

A new feature release is now available for this leading open-source BLAS linear algebra library...

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 5.8-rc1 test build as what he describes as one of the biggest releases of all time...

Hours ahead of the expected Linux 5.8-rc1 release that also marks the merge window closure of new features for this next kernel version, a secondary EXT4 file-system set of changes were just mailed in...

Linus Torvalds is expected to release Linux 5.8-rc1 following the two week long Linux 5.8 kernel merge window. Here is our overview of all the big changes coming with this next version of the Linux kernel.

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32...

With Ubuntu 18.04 when running on its Linux 4.15 kernel and not one of the newer hardware enablement kernels, in the mess of patches back-ported to the release it ends up being vulnerable to bypassing the kernel lockdown security and compromising UEFI Secure Boot that is persistent across reboots...

Details are still coming in but INTEL-SA-00320, a.k.a. "CrossTalk", is the newest Intel side-channel CPU vulnerability...

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches...

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...

The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19 on schedule this morning...

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs...

Merged back in Linux 5.7 was the new exFAT file-system driver backed by Samsung and replacing the prior "staging" exFAT driver that had been around for the prior few kernel releases. Samsung has now sent their queued up exFAT improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...

The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code...

Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance...

With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round...

Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichlid" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichlid. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...

Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.