Phoronix

Debian 11 is starting its release dance next month with the initial transition and essentials freeze while the actual stable release should make it out later in the year. For now Debian 10 remains the current stable series and this weekend marks the debut of Debian GNU/Linux 10.7...

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation...

Earlier this week I looked at the Spectre mitigation performance impact on AMD Zen+ / Zen 2 / Zen 3 processors given the recent launch of the Ryzen 5000 series and those newest CPUs still requiring some mitigation handling. Questions were raised about the Spectre mitigation handling on Windows, so I ran some quick tests there as I happened to have a Windows 10 install on the Ryzen 9 5900X test box at the moment for some unrelated Windows vs. Linux gaming...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions...

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.

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...

Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0...

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a fresh batch of changes this week for Fedora 34 that is due out next spring...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...