Phoronix

The release candidates for OpenZFS 2.1 continue dragging on with Tuesday marking the eighth such test version while bringing Linux 5.13 compatibility and other fixes...

Linux PC hardware manufacturer System76 has released Pop!_OS 21.04 as the newest version of their Ubuntu downstream that also features their new GNOME-based COSMIC desktop...

The x86 platform driver updates have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. This area of the kernel principally benefits x86 laptop support on Linux but also has other drivers like around the Intel Speed Select Technology and more...

AMD-specific code within Linux's KVM virtualization component previously could allow a KVM guest to breakout into the host. This bug persisted in the Linux kernel from late 2020 to March 2021 before being addressed and is the first known issue of such a guest-to-host breakout that didn't also depend upon bugs within user-space components...

After looking recently at the FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" using a Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE server, the next round of benchmarking from this server with AMD EPYC 7543 32-core processor was looking at its support (all tested 2021 Linux distributions were running fine on this latest-generation AMD server) and performance across 11 current Linux distribution releases from Arch, CentOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.

While Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" was talked about for launching in late 2021, that was widely expected to be delayed. Intel today proactively confirmed that Sapphire Rapids will now begin production in Q1'2022 with their ramp beginning in Q2'2022...

Quietly released last week by AMD was their Radeon Software for Linux 21.20 driver providing the latest packaged "Open" and "PRO" (Closed) driver components for use within enterprise Linux environments...

Linux 5.14 has cleared out its legacy IDE code from the kernel that means dropping more than forty thousand lines of code...

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release...

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021...

Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads...

The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision...

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio...

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...