Phoronix

The Linux 5.4 merge window is set to end today with the release of Linux 5.4-rc1. With the major pull requests in, here is a look at the prominent changes and new features coming with Linux 5.4. As is standard practice, there will be about eight weekly release candidates of Linux 5.4 prior to officially releasing this kernel as stable in late November or potentially early December depending upon how the cycle plays out.

A second batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for the Linux 5.4 kernel have landed...

Intel's SNA "Sandybridge New Acceleration" for 2D acceleration via their deprecated xf86-video-intel X.Org driver has seen some improvements, which is rare these days considering the for this driver that has been in perpetual version 3.0 development for the past six years...

With all of the CPU security bugs over the past two years and heightened concerns about hardware vulnerabilities in general, the upstream Linux kernel has been working to create a formal process for dealing with the disclosure process and addressing said issues within the kernel code...

With Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, developers have begun pushing changes targeted for Plasma 5.18. The KDE Plasma 5.18 release isn't set to arrive until next February but if any of the recent releases are an indication, it should be another exciting and solid release...

While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators...

It was just two days ago that Richard Stallman said he would continue as head of the GNU project after last week having resigned as head of the Free Software Foundation (as well as his post at MIT), but this afternoon he reportedly has stepped down from his GNU leadership role...

Given recent updates to the Intel Scalable Video Technology (SVT) open-source video encoders as well as other open-source video encoders/decoders, here is a fresh look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server against the Intel competition with the dual Xeon Platinum 8280...

While yesterday Linus Torvalds was still undecided on whether to pull in the long-revised "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches and wanted to review them patch-by-patch, following that lengthy examination he has decided to indeed land this opt-in restricted functionality for Linux 5.4...

For those running the GNOME Wayland session and having issues with windows not grabbing keyboard input after a child window is closed with Java applications like IntelliJ, Mutter has landed a fix...

Wine 4.17 was released yesterday that merged the DXTn support and other improvements from Wine-Staging. Meanwhile Wine-Staging 4.17 is out today to re-up their game with now more than 850 patches in total against upstream Wine...

Added back during the Linux 5.1 cycle was IO_uring for fast and efficient I/O. This new interface allows for queue rings to be shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. With Linux 5.4, IO_uring is in even better shape...

AMD released Radeon Open Compute 2.8 (ROCm 2.8) for ending out September. But to some surprise and sadness, this open-source Radeon GPU compute stack still isn't supporting the Navi GPUs...

RPM 4.15 is officially out this week as the newest version of the RPM Package Manager most often associated with Red Hat / Fedora systems...

Oracle has reaffirmed their "long term commitment to deliver innovation on Oracle Solaris" though it still doesn't look like anything past Solaris 11 will materialize...

DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has done another weekly update to DXVK for helping weekend gamers have the best Steam Play / Proton experience...

Wine 4.17 has been uncorked for weekend testing as the newest bi-weekly feature development release of this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms...

The Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is set to close this weekend and as of writing it's still yet to be decided by Linus Torvalds whether to accept the kernel "lockdown" functionality feature for this release...

In addition to adding Intel Icelake support to the kernel's processor thermal / int340x code, there is an interesting change with the thermal management updates for Linux 5.4 to potentially boost the performance on Intel platforms...

With this week's release of the much anticipated CentOS 8.0 as the community/free rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as well as the surprise announcement of the bleeding-edge, rolling-release CentOS Stream, we have begun benchmarking these enterprise Linux distribution releases. Up today are our first tests of CentOS 7.7 against CentOS 8.0 and the early CentOS Stream state on Intel Xeon Cascadelake and AMD EPYC Rome servers.