Phoronix

One of the most frequent critiques of Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been its lackluster support in dealing with proprietary/third-party packages like the Google Chrome web browser and Valve's Steam gaming client. Since last summer, Clear Linux has been working on their third-party packaging support with their unique "bundles" system, but not much has been heard on the matter since...

Feature work of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver work for Linux 5.7 is winding down now that Linux 5.6 is almost to its sixth release candidate this weekend, but sent in this week by AMD were a few more AMDGPU items though mostly amounting to fixes for their graphics driver...

In addition to WebAssembly's growing presence outside of the web browser thanks to various desktop run-times and interesting use-cases, WebAssembly is also popping up in other areas. Google has been working on WebAssembly support for extensions within network proxies typically reserved for C/C++ or the likes of Lua scripts...

On Tuesday the Load Value Injection (LVI) attack was disclosed by Intel and security researchers as a new class of transient-execution attacks and could lead to injecting data into a victim program and in turn stealing data, including from within SGX enclaves. While Intel has publicly stated they don't believe the LVI attack to be practical, one of their open-source compiler wizards did go ahead and add mitigation options to the GNU Assembler as part of the GCC toolchain. Here are benchmarks showing the performance impact of enabling those new LVI mitigation options and the significant impact they can cause on run-time performance in real-world workloads.

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye...

We continue to see bits here and there of AMD Family 19h / Zen 3 support coming together for the mainline Linux kernel...

Following last week's release of GCC 8.4, the GCC 9.3 compiler is out in offering the latest fixes to the newer (and current) GCC 9 compiler series...

The Turnip Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors can now handle transform feedback...

While Windows and Linux have seen good 802.11ac "WiFi 5" support and these days are focused on 802.11ax "WiFi 6" with the latest wireless chipsets, FreeBSD is still tackling 802.11ac. But the FreeBSD Foundation is prepared to soon begin sponsoring development work on ironing out their 802.11ac support...

It's been seven years since Intel launched the "Bay Trail" Atom processors and the Linux fixes for it and the succeeding Cherry Trail continue to materialize for the kernel...

One of the latest patch series being worked on by long-time open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Christian König is P2P DMA-BUF support...

Wasmer 0.16 is released as the newest version of this "universal WebAssembly runtime" for running WebAssembly programs on the desktop that could in turn be written in a number of different programming languages...

With the release of Firefox 74.0 yesterday and that also pushing Firefox 75.0 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux of Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta, both out-of-the-box and when force enabling WebRender...

Yesterday the Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability was disclosed by Intel and researchers and affecting newer Intel CPUs with SGX and requiring mitigations outside of all the speculative execution mitigations the past two years. The GNU Assembler patches adding new options for mitigation have now been merged to Git master...

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen had the honor of announcing GNOME 3.36 as the latest half-year update to the GNOME 3 desktop environment...

A Google researcher has been developing "LoadLibrary" as a means of being able to load Windows Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that in turn can be used by native Linux code...

Prolific ACO shader compiler back-end developer Timur Kristóf has managed to land his latest improvements in Mesa 20.1-devel for this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end supported so far by the RADV Vulkan driver...

Unicode 13 is now officially available with standardizing 143,859 different characters...

GNOME 3.36 is slated to be released today so here is a look back at much of the prominent work being introduced in this six month update to the GNOME desktop...

SDL 2.0.12 is now available as the latest stable update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer that is the library commonly used by cross-platform games as a hardware/software abstraction layer...