Phoronix

As expected, the Wayland 1.19 release dance has begun...

The Fedora Project is the latest open-source software project working to migrate their Git repositories off using the existing default branch name of "master" and instead using "main" but for some repositories will be "rawhide" where it better aligns with the usage in Fedora Rawhide packages to their development development...

Lavapipe (nee Vallium) continues picking up more functionality for this software-based Vulkan implementation just as LLVMpipe is to OpenGL...

Arcan, the rather unique and innovative display server in development for about five years, is now matching or even surpassing the feature parity with the X.Org Server and have also issued a new release of their "Durden" desktop environment build atop Arcan...

The main feature change for the XFS driver code in Linux 5.11 is adding a new "needs repair" feature flag. When the XFS code marks a file-system as needing repair, it will refuse to mount until the xfs_repair operation is run on it...

Revealed earlier this year was the Arm Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability. SLS was a Google discovery for modern ARMv8 CPUs where speculative execution past unconditional changes in control flow could lead to information disclosure via side-channel analysis. Arm recommended compiler-based mitigations to insert speculation barriers after vulnerable instructions, which GCC and LLVM began adding opt-in protections right away. This weekend some additional SLS functionality was added for LLVM...

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.0-RC3 is now an updated Wine-Staging build for those that want a more experimental/testing blend of Wine...

The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) changes were sent in today for the Linux 5.11 cycle...

It looks like Mozilla Firefox very soon will be enabling support for AVIF as the image format based on AV1 video coding...

After undergoing review the past several months, Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) is merged with the Linux 5.11 kernel...

The pandemic isn't slowing down work on GNOME 40... In addition to this week's release of GTK 4.0, GNOME Shell developers continue progressing on some visible improvements slated for this 2021 desktop update...

Intel released a new version of their SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) this weekend that brings new improvements for this compiler that supports a variant of C focused on single-program, multiple-data programming for Intel's CPU and GPU targets...

Announced back in 2018 by the MIPI Alliance was the I3C Host Controller Interface (HCI) 1.0 specification whereby a common I3C HCI driver could support a range of multi-vendor sensors and other components relying on I3C...

Taking many by surprise was the news last week of CentOS 8 being EOL'ed next year as what has been a popular downstream of Red Hat Entrprise Linux that is free of charge and often adapted for use within large organizations. Instead, IBM-owned Red Hat is looking to position CentOS "Stream" in front of RHEL as its upstream. That still isn't sitting over well for many and today is a new post on the CentOS Blog...

This first week of the Linux 5.11 merge window continues to be very active with many of the kernel maintainers looking to land their changes ahead of the Christmas week where they are often taking time off work...

Winter holidays haven't yet slowed down the pace of improvements for the KDE desktop stack. It was another busy week enhancing KDE Plasma and related desktop components with new functionality and fixes...

The Debian project's current website has arguably a rather dated look and feel but work is underway on modernizing the website to give it a fresh look. This week the project rolled out a redesigned homepage...

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues seeing new work around its transparent data compression, optional case insensitive behavior, and native encryption support with the new code queued for Linux 5.11...

Announced just over one month ago to the day was the AMD Instinct MI100 and as part of that the ROCM 4.0 software stack. ROCm 4.0 didn't end up actually shipping then but today its sources were uploaded and release builds made available...

There has been some early success geting Ubuntu up and running on Apple's M1 ARM hardware with using the Apple Hypervisor Framework but it looks like a much better experience is on the way with the forthcoming Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon...