Phoronix

If it wasn't odd enough during these pandemic times seeing Nintendo 64 support upstreamed into the Linux 5.12 kernel a few weeks back, the latest vintage hardware seeing open-source support still going on is the Motorola 68000 series 32-bit processors. LLVM/Clang today merged the "m68k" target for these three decade old processors...

While Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors are launching this month, Intel's open-source Linux driver developers known for their punctual support are already preparing early code around their 14th Gen "Lunar Lake" platform...

The patch series implementing support for Wayland's Presentation-Time protocol within the Mutter compositor has been merged ahead of this month's GNOME 40 release...

AMD has announced that next week on 15 March they will be hosting a digital launch event for the EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors...

Following the surprise announcement last year that CentOS 8 will be EOL'ed at the end of 2021 to focus instead on CentOS Stream and all the uncertainty that brought with Red Hat now being owned by IBM, new distributions like Rocky Linux were conceived while existing Linux distributions have been looking to capitalize on that move. Oracle Linux has been advertising how it's a great RHEL downstream while Canonical is now promoting how Ubuntu is a great replacement to CentOS...

One of the many great programs at SUSE is the roughly annual program where their developers can focus for one week on any new open-source development they desire. SUSE Hack Week has led to many great innovations and improvements since it began in the mid-2000s and for the Hack Week later this month there is one project attempt we are eager to see tackled...

Over the past month developers on Haiku as the open-source operating system inspired by BeOS have continued advancing the project...

University of Illinois researchers have discovered that Intel's CPU ring interconnects are vulnerable to exploit by side-channel attacks. This opens a whole new can of worms with the cross-core interconnect now being vulnerable to exploit but so far Intel doesn't appear to be overly concerned and there are some open questions on whether this interconnect exploit would still work with the latest Intel Xeon processors...

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Waffle as the library abstracting OpenGL and windowing system selection to run-time while this weekend marked its v1.7 release...

For a number of years it has been known that the Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 code is potentially unsafe and not nearly as mature as the native RAID support found in this Linux file-system for other levels. Finally now we are seeing the Btrfs user-space programs warn the user when attempting to create such Btrfs native RAID 5/6 configurations...

For those using Gallium3D Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker when running Windows games on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK for going through Vulkan, next quarter's Mesa 21.1 will better handle 32-bit games with the Nine state tracker...

While Linux 5.12-rc2 released on Friday due to that prominent corruption bug, there still is some Sunday kernel fun with Greg Kroah-Hartman releasing a slew of stable kernel updates including Linux 5.11.4 and 5.10.21 LTS...

With the exciting "HWCAPS" feature of Glibc 2.33+ allowing for optimized versions of libraries to be more easily deployed on Linux systems, diagnosing issues around it can be a bit more complicated but on the way for Glibc 2.34 is a welcome improvement to help in such issues...

Over the years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has resulted in some really great projects in the X.Org ecosystem from work in the early days on the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack to VKMS more recently to many other improvements especially as it pertains to open-source graphics drivers / Mesa. But for Google Summer of Code 2021 at least, the organization will not be participating...

With plans of formally releasing FreeBSD 13.0 at month's end, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 is available this weekend and on-schedule for helping to test and evaluate this forthcoming major BSD operating system update...

KDE developers have been off to a busy March so far with working on adaptive panel opacity support for Plasma 5.22. Another pleasant improvement with that next Plasma release is to avoid rendering work when the screen is off...

Released this week was Intel's open-source oneAPI Level Zero v1.2.3 for the headers and loader based on their public oneAPI Level Zero specification...

The LABWC Wayland compositor advertises itself as an Openbox alternative and just saw its inaugural release...

Disclosed by Arm last summer was the Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability and they were quick to introduce new safeguards against SLS in the GCC and LLVM compilers. The compiler-based mitigations to straight-line speculation involves adding speculation barrier sequences around the vulnerable instructions to prevent speculatively executing instructions around changes in control flow. While compiler developers were quick to add the options, so far the Linux kernel developers are in disagreement still over its importance and the proposed patches that would flip on this option when compiling the ARM Linux kernel...

Exiv2, the widely-used C++ metadata library / tools for dealing with image metadata via EXIF / IPTC / XMP standards and ICC profiles is looking to join the KDE project...