Phoronix

Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version...

Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Yes, this does mean performance implications for workloads benefiting from TSX. This change has seemingly not been talked about much at all publicly and I just happened to become aware of it when looking through new kernel patches...

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.13 kernel, the GNU folks have released GNU Linux-libre 5.13-gnu as their downstream that strips out support for loading binary-only firmware/microcode, blocks the ability to load binary-only kernel modules, and other sanitization work in the name of software freedom...

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said "yes" to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution's next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts...

Among the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.14 merge window are the scheduler updates that includes the introduction of Core Scheduling. The Core Scheduling functionality has been in the works for the past few years by multiple vendors for better securing SMT systems following various vulnerabilities coming to light around Hyper Threading...

The KVM changes were submitted early ahead of the now-open Linux 5.14 merge window...

Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable...

Of the many new features in Linux 5.13 one of the prominent security features is the ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call. With Linux 5.13 stable imminent, here are some performance benchmarks of the impact from enabling this security feature...

With the half-way point for the year upon us, here is a look back at the most exciting Mesa open-source graphics driver news so far in 2021 with exciting contributions from Microsoft, AMD and Intel continuing to be the most open-source friendly graphics vendors, Zink making remarkable progress for OpenGL over Vulkan, performance optimizations galore, more embedded Vulkan drivers coming about, and other milestones for open-source Linux graphics...

Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis...

The hid-input kernel driver with Linux 5.14 is set to see support for "Programmable Buttons" as outlined by the USB HID specification...

Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged...

With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage...

Linux 5.13 will debut tomorrow if Linus Torvalds is comfortable with the state of the code-base, which in turn will mark the opening of the Linux 5.14 merge window. Here is a look at what is on the table for this next follow-on version of the Linux kernel...

A proposal by NVIDIA engineers for the mainline Linux kernel would introduce the Hardware Timestamping Engine (HTE) subsystem...

Software running on DragonFlyBSD and making use of pthreads is set to see better performance around low-level locks when heavily contested...

While some Huawei engineers are currently facing criticism for submitting superfluous kernel patches in an effort to boost their own or the company's standing in the kernel community, other engineers are Huawei are working on more substantive kernel patches. Here's a rather peculiar new patch series out on Friday where a Huawei engineer is effectively proposing an in-kernel transactional database...

Even with Akademy 2021 this week as the annual KDE developer conference, thanks in part to it being a virtual event the KDE developers still managed to remain quite productive on new code changes...

Coreboot making progress on its temporary RAM initialization code (cache as RAM) means that its usage of the FSP-T binary blob is increasingly unnecessary...