
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 1 hour 58 min ago
Initial AMD Zen 3 Support Successfully Lands In GCC 11
A few days ago AMD finally sent out the initial AMD Zen 3 "znver3" support to the GCC compiler with the LLVM Clang support to follow. That initial "-march=znver3" targeting support has now been merged for GCC 11...
Wine-Staging 6.0-RC1 Stacks 740 Patches Atop Upstream Wine
Following yesterday's release of Wine 6.0-RC1 that is kicking off the release process for this annual release of Wine, the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend of Wine is also updated...
Scheiße! KDE Plasma 5.21 To Add Palette For Easier Input Of Accented Characters
KDE developers have been busy so far in December making improvements from seemingly never-ending Wayland improvements to new features like easier support for accented character input without having to remember key sequences or changing your keyboard layout...
Wasmer 1.0 Beta Released For Running WebAssembly Code Anywhere
Wasmer is one of the leading software solutions aiming to bring WebAssembly (WASM) to the desktop rather than largely isolated to the web browser as is the case now. Wasmer aims to allow WASM programs anywhere and on any client while quickly closing in on its 1.0 release...
Loongson64 Finally Seeing KASLR With Mainline Linux 5.11 Kernel
While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform...
Wine 6.0-RC1 Released Following Last Minute Changes
As expected, the first release candidate of Wine 6.0 is now available for testing for this annual update to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...
Raspberry Pi OS Switches To PulseAudio, Updated Chromium
Just in time for any holiday Raspberry Pi purchases, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is available today for the Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for these budget ARM SBCs...
Google Opens Up "Atheris" To Automatically Find Bugs In Python Code
Google today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions...
Another Look At The Performance Impact To IBM's POWER9 L1d Flushing Change
Last week I provided some benchmarks looking at the IBM POWER9 mitigation for the L1 data cache needing to be flushed upon entering the kernel and on user accesses due to a recently disclosed vulnerability. POWER9 allows speculatively operating on validated data in the L1 cache, but when it comes to incompletely validated data paired with other side channels it could lead to local users potentially obtaining improper access to data in the L1 data cache. When benchmarking the impact on a POWER9 4c/16t CPU the overall impact was fairly modest while since then I fired up some benchmarks as well on a large POWER9 server with 44 cores / 176 threads to see the performance impact of this default Linux kernel change.
Mesa 21.0 Adds Radeon HEVC SAO Encode Support
For the "Video Core Next 2" hardware like Navi as well as Renoir APUs, HEVC "sample adaptive offset" support has landed in Mesa 21.0...
Arch Linux's Pacman 6.0 Enters Alpha With Parallel Downloads Support
Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0...
Fedora 34 To Feature Updated MariaDB, Other Changes
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a fresh batch of changes this week for Fedora 34 that is due out next spring...
EPYC Zen 3 CPU Support Coming To Linux's AMD_Energy Driver
In addition to AMD Zen 1/2/3 PowerCap RAPL support coming for the Linux 5.11 kernel, the hwmon-next Git branch has also queued initial support for Zen 3 processors within the AMD_Energy driver...
Linux 5.11 Adding An "Inhibited" Feature To Temporarily Disregard Select Input Devices
The Linux kernel's input subsystem is gaining a new "inhibited" property feature as a policy to temporarily block input from given devices, including not using any event from them as a possible wake-up source...
System76 Bringing Out "Pangolin" As An AMD Renoir Linux Laptop
Ever since AMD has been on a stellar trajectory with their hardware, users have been begging System76 to release an AMD Linux laptop... That's now finally coming with their upcoming Pangolin launch...
Mesa 20.3 Released With Big Improvements For Open-Source Graphics Drivers
Mesa 20.3 has been released as the Q4'2020 open-source graphics driver update, primarily around providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics along with the reverse-engineered Nouveau support, many smaller drivers especially in the embedded space, and the growing list of CPU-based implementations and other translation efforts...
AMD Sends Out Zen 3 Compiler Support For GCC + AOCC 2.3 Compiler Released
Following last month's release of the Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" processors, AMD has now begun publishing their official compiler support for this extremely compelling processor family...
AMD Is Making Progress On Open-Source Firmware - Initially With OpenBMC
While we are still waiting to see what AMD might do for returning to open-source AGESA or better supporting Coreboot and the like, they are making some inroads with open-source firmware support -- beyond the context of Chromebooks where they continue to engage due to Google's engineering requirements. AMD is working to "align with the industry direction of open-source firmware stacks" with their initial focus being on open-source OpenBMC firmware support for their server platforms...
Manjaro 20.2 Brings Arch-Based Linux 5.9 Experience, GNOME Version Defaults To Wayland
Manjaro 20.2 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux derived distribution focused on providing a pleasant and easy-to-use desktop experience...
Khronos Brings New Physically Based Rendering Materials Support To glTF
The Khronos Group's glTF specification that is a transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues picking up more impressive capabilities as its adoption by a growing range of software packages continue...