Phoronix

LLVM 10.0 released back in March and today marks the first point release finally shipping. Normally they try to be a bit more punctual in shipping the seldom point releases to LLVM but today marks LLVM 10.0.1 finally being available, just over one month out from the planned LLVM 11.0 debut...

Back in June when Arm disclosed their Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability affecting their modern ARM processor designs there wasn't a whole lot of attention. It seems SLS is serious enough that Arm is working on bringing their compiler-based mitigations to existing GCC releases beyond it already being in the current development code...

Fedora like most distributions ship their Wine packages as-is at the defaults, but for Fedora 33 we could see DXVK used by default on Wine in place of the conventional WineD3D back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage...

AMD today officially revealed their Renoir-based Ryzen 4000 APUs. Unfortunately though for enthusiasts, at least for now these APUs are just available for pre-built systems and OEMs...

Back in May the folks at TUXEDO Computers in Germany launched their first AMD Linux laptop. That device though was a letdown in being based on a previous-generation AMD Ryzen 3000 series mobile processor rather than the far better Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" processors. Fortunately, today they announced the Pulse 15 laptop that comes in Ryzen 5 4600H and Ryzen 7 4800H processor options...

A new version of the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM implementation was released last week with many fixes and other improvements over its prior release...

AMD has just issued their first new open-source AMDVLK Vulkan driver release in several weeks...

Jiving with all the recent rumors, the latest Linux kernel patch work further spells out clearly that Intel Alder Lake will feature a hybrid core design akin to Arm's big.LITTLE architecture...

In looking beyond the massive Fedora 33 release in development, Fedora developers have begun discussing options for allowing better memory testing on their distribution for evaluating possible faulty RAM issues that otherwise often get mixed in with other software bugs and other sporadic behavior...

Along with Linux 5.9 set to add NVMe ZNS support for the spec surrounding placement of data within zones, more broadly this next kernel is positioned to bring dm-crypt support for zoned block devices...

Merged just over one week ago to the mainline kernel were inclusive terminology guidelines following the recent discussion among upstream developers. The Linux sound subsystem has begun preparing patches for Linux 5.9 to overhaul their naming conventions as a result...

While Fedora 33 desktop variants are aiming to use Btrfs by default, non-desktop environments are not and Red Hat remains committed to XFS and their Stratis Storage technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Coming to Fedora 33 will also likely be Stratis 2.1 for offering the latest on that front...

Surprising many in the open-source community in recent weeks was the LibreOffice 7.0 release candidate branded as a "Personal Edition". While still being free/open-source software and no licensing change, the traditional LibreOffice build was going to be marketed as "Personal Edition" to differentiate from other stakeholders that may market their professional/enterprise services around this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Those Personal Edition plans are now officially being reverted from next month's LibreOffice 7.0 release...

For those looking at an NVMe PCIe M.2 solid-state drive enclosure for connecting to USB 3.1/3.2 systems, Sabrent offers a nice option with their EC-TFNB enclosure that is constructed out of aluminum, 100% tool-free, and runs well. I recently bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure along with the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, which offers nice performance for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and the 2TB capacity can be found for just about $250 USD.

Over the past several months there has been work on Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver for async page-flipping to yield better performance. That work was revised against today for hopefully making it into a kernel release in the near future albeit too late for Linux 5.9 but regardless nice to see this work moving forward...

A few months back we wrote of experimental work for creating "secret" memory areas with memfd and now that work has turned into the secretmemfd system call that is under review...

Vulkan 1.2.148 was released on Sunday with two new extensions...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver allows pre-GCN AMD graphics card owners continue making use of their graphics cards, there are diminishing returns with newer games requiring Vulkan that is not supported by pre-HD7000 series hardware as well as far greater performance and efficiency improvements in the more recent generations. In any case, if you are still using a Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics card, some new life is being pushed into the open-source driver via the in-development NIR back-end...

The latest FFmpeg multimedia library code can see faster H.265 video encoding with the Video Acceleration API when running on Icelake and newer Intel graphics...

While Linus Torvalds has been concerned by the size of Linux 5.8 at times, he just released Linux 5.8-rc6 and so far things are looking good...