Phoronix

As an additional security measure for the Linux kernel, Intel engineers are exploring making kernel page tables read-only and to then only allow writing on a per-CPU basis when they need to be modified. This would be handled using the PKS functionality found with future Intel processors...

While physical GPUs may be in short supply right now, VMware is preparing for "SVGA v3" as their next-gen virtual PCI graphics adapter for use within VMware virtual machines for graphics acceleration backed by the host...

The Qt Company today released Qt Creator 4.15 as the newest version of this open-source Qt and C++ focused integrated development environment...

The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting on CPU topology and various power/frequency metrics has some useful additions pending for the Linux 5.13 kernel...

For those wondering how the recent releases of the GCC 11 and LLVM 12 (Clang 12) open-source compilers are competing on AMD Zen 3, here are some recently conducted benchmarks looking at that showdown on an AMD EPYC 7763 1P server.

Linux's perf tooling for dealing with hardware performance counters and associated monitoring has seen a number of nice updates for the Linux 5.13 kernel cycle...

If you are still relying on Apache OpenOffice in 2021 you might want to really make it a goal this year to transition to the much more featureful LibreOffice, but in any case you'll want to move at least to OpenOffice 4.1.10...

Over the years there have been a number of rounds of patches published for speculative page faulting. The goal has been to support user-space page-faults without holding the memory management semaphores and to ultimately allow for better performance especially with threaded workloads. A fresh take on the speculative page faulting (SPF) functionality was recently volleyed on the kernel mailing list...

Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for Linux 5.13 have been submitted in providing the latest features for this flash-optimized file-system...

Introduced last year was Taiwins as a compact Wayland compositor. While early on it began using Sway's WLROOTS library, it ended up writing its own Wayland compositor library (libtaiwins) and recently hit its version 0.3 milestone...

For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment...

Merged as part of the block subsystem changes for the Linux 5.13 were the usual assortment of enhancements to the exciting IO_uring. With this next kernel there is yet even better performance out of this morning Linux I/O interface...

Adding to the variety of places where the Linux kernel supports making use of Zstd compression, kernel modules moving forward can now enjoy size reductions with Zstd...

Released on Friday was a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland...

While Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and their Azure cloud has largely been x86_64 focused, with the Linux 5.13 kernel they are moving further for supporting Linux as a ARM64 Hyper-V guest...

While last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" improvements managed to make it for GCC 11 that was recently released, the recent debut of LLVM 12.0 wasn't so lucky on the Zen 3 support front. There was the very basic enablement that landed in LLVM 12 but now the more complete support isn't expected until LLVM 13 this autumn...

Those moving to Mesa 21.x releases for the latest open-source GPU driver support on Linux are seemingly finding their Valve "Trust Factor" matchmaking system scores dropping for Counter-Strike: GO, leading to numerous upset Linux gamers with AMD Radeon GPUs...

Last week the big set of networking subsystem updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 merge window...

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has finally merged support for the KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension...