Phoronix

PipeWire 0.3.40 is out today with various bug fixes but also a number of improvements...

OEMs have begun releasing updated BIOS/firmware revisions to address new security vulnerabilities disclosed this week by Intel. Most pressing are potential security vulnerabilities within the BIOS reference code used by various Intel CPUs that could lead to privilege escalation by local users and ranked a "high" impact severity...

As part of Google's effort around fuzzing for improving open-source security, the company today announced ClusterFuzzLite as their new, easy-to-use solution for fuzzing open and closed-source projects with ease as part of the CI/CD process...

Prominent Btrfs file-system developer Josef Bacik is working through a big set of patches that will result in on-disk format changes to Btrfs but address some of "the more painful parts" to the file-system's design...

Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Wednesday for the nearly over Linux 5.16 merge window...

Last week saw the main set of ACPI and power management changes for Linux 5.16 while merged on Wednesday were a secondary set of updates. Notable on the ACPI side are some changes in preparing for allowing Linux drivers to "probe" hardware while being powered off...

The Mesa 21.3 development cycle continues dragging on due to blocker bugs affecting the Intel code, so instead it's another week with a new release candidate...

Coreboot 4.15 was tagged today as the latest advertised version of this open-source firmware implementation for systems. With this new version are 21 additional laptops and motherboards supported...

While many Linux users were excited years ago around EOMA68 and in part the possibility of an open, upgradeable laptop design, it has yet to ship and looking like it never will -- not to mention being very outdated specifications by today's standards. Entirely unrelated to that prior upgradeable hardware effort but continuing in similar goals is The Framework Laptop. The Framework Laptop is a thin, upgradeable notebook that is Linux-friendly and allows the user to easily upgrade their own components. I was testing The Framework Laptop for a while and from the hardware perspective is a very nice device and running well under Linux.

Over the past nearly two decades Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been known as an initiative for getting students involved with open-source software development over the course of a summer while receiving a stipend/grant from Google. Beginning next year, GSoC will no longer be limited to students but open to all adults. Additionally, other changes are also coming...

Valve just sent out an email to pre-order customers that the Steam Deck release is being delayed by two months...

While since the end of October there has been NVIDIA 495.44 as the stable 495 series driver beta for Linux users, out today is their v470.86 release for those using that older long-term support branch...

The annual OpenZFS Developer Summit wrapped up yesterday with interesting talks on this open-source, cross-platform ZFS file-system implementation...

For fans of Jolla's Linux-based smartphone platform, Sailfish OS 4.3 "Suomenlinna" is out today...

Seagate engineers yesterday used the Open Compute Project Global Summit for the first public demonstration of a native NVMe hard drive. The hope is moving forward both HDDs and SSDs in the data center will consolidate to using the NVMe interface...

Posted last year for introduction in the GCC 11 stable compiler released earlier this year was the initial Alder Lake "alderlake" target. Now that Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" processors are officially out, Intel engineers have updated their Alder Lake tuning for the GNU Compiler Collection to yield more efficient performance with GCC 12 due out in Q2'2022...

Running the past two days was the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit. One of the most interesting presentations from this virtual event was on the status of DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the OpenZFS file-system and the performance boost it can offer in relevant areas...

While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...

Merged last week into the Linux 5.16 kernel is improved Retpoline "return trampoline" code...

HP announced today that select upcoming HP workstations will begin seeing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) pre-installed...