Phoronix

While Windows and Linux have seen good 802.11ac "WiFi 5" support and these days are focused on 802.11ax "WiFi 6" with the latest wireless chipsets, FreeBSD is still tackling 802.11ac. But the FreeBSD Foundation is prepared to soon begin sponsoring development work on ironing out their 802.11ac support...

It's been seven years since Intel launched the "Bay Trail" Atom processors and the Linux fixes for it and the succeeding Cherry Trail continue to materialize for the kernel...

One of the latest patch series being worked on by long-time open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Christian König is P2P DMA-BUF support...

Wasmer 0.16 is released as the newest version of this "universal WebAssembly runtime" for running WebAssembly programs on the desktop that could in turn be written in a number of different programming languages...

With the release of Firefox 74.0 yesterday and that also pushing Firefox 75.0 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux of Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta, both out-of-the-box and when force enabling WebRender...

Yesterday the Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability was disclosed by Intel and researchers and affecting newer Intel CPUs with SGX and requiring mitigations outside of all the speculative execution mitigations the past two years. The GNU Assembler patches adding new options for mitigation have now been merged to Git master...

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen had the honor of announcing GNOME 3.36 as the latest half-year update to the GNOME 3 desktop environment...

A Google researcher has been developing "LoadLibrary" as a means of being able to load Windows Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that in turn can be used by native Linux code...

Prolific ACO shader compiler back-end developer Timur Kristóf has managed to land his latest improvements in Mesa 20.1-devel for this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end supported so far by the RADV Vulkan driver...

Unicode 13 is now officially available with standardizing 143,859 different characters...

GNOME 3.36 is slated to be released today so here is a look back at much of the prominent work being introduced in this six month update to the GNOME desktop...

SDL 2.0.12 is now available as the latest stable update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer that is the library commonly used by cross-platform games as a hardware/software abstraction layer...

Proton 5.0-4 is out as Valve's Wine-based layer for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play...

Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far...

The newest open-source project out of Amazon Web Services is Bottlerocket, a Linux-based operating system designed for hosting containers and largely written in Rust code...

We've known that Intel's P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the "powersave" governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the "performance" governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency...

Load Value Injection (LVI) is being disclosed today as a new class of transient-execution attacks and the researchers claim can defeat all existing mitigations around Meltdown, Foreshadow, Zombieload, RIDL and Fallout. The researchers say LVI can affect virtually any access to memory and compiler-based mitigations can be expensive...

With the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring there is going to be a new exFAT file-system drive developed by Samsung as outlined last week. While that is being added to the formal file-system area of the kernel rather than staging so both could co-exist for a transition period, already with Linux 5.7 will be the removal of the existing staging driver...

RenderDoc 1.7 is out today for this cross-platform graphics debugging/profiling tool that supports Vulkan, Direct3D, and OpenGL graphics APIs across all major platforms...

Git 2.26-rc1 is out this morning as the newest test version of this distributed version control system...