Phoronix

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers...

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car...

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration...

KDE Frameworks 5.62 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit offerings...

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland...

Based off yesterday's release of Wine 4.16, the Wine-Staging 4.16 update out today is more prominent with a number of new patches introduced to this experimental/testing flavor of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux...

For fans of the lightweight Slax Linux distribution, version 9.11 is now available and is re-based against upstream Debian 9.11 for this operating system that was resurrected two years ago...

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks...

Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems...

In time for any weekend gaming, Valve's team maintaining their Proton downstream of Wine for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux has issued their v4.11-4 update...

Wine 4.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot leading up to the Wine 5.0 release in just a few more months...

Complementing our recent AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Linux benchmarking, with recently having out the Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, here are benchmarks showing that previous $999 USD six-core / twelve-thread processor compared to today's Ryzen 5 3600X (and previous-generation Ryzen 5 2600X) as well as the Core i7 8700K.

Newer high-end Lenovo ThinkPad laptops feature an option called "PrivacyGuard" for restricting the usable vertical and horizontal viewing angles of the LCD display, similar to what has been achievable previously using film covers and the like. With Linux 5.4 this feature will be supported by the kernel if concerned about others looking over your shoulders at your screen, etc...

Besides KDE seeing its own HiDPI improvements like fractional scaling on Wayland recently landing, the Qt5 tool-kit is seeing more HiDPI improvements on its end too...

Richard Hughes has released GNOME Firmware 3.34, his new project formerly known as the GNOME Firmware Update as an alternative interface outside of GNOME Software for managing firmware updates on Linux. Additionally, Fwupd 1.3.1 is out with the newest firmware updating bits...

After going through 40+ rounds of revisions and review, the Linux kernel "LOCKDOWN" feature might finally make it into the Linux 5.4 mainline kernel...

With Hyper Threading continuing to look increasingly unsafe in data centers / shared computing environments in light of all the speculative execution vulnerabilities exposed thus far particularly with L1TF and MDS having no SMT-secure mitigation, DigitalOcean continues working on their Linux kernel "core scheduling" patches so they can still make use of HT/SMT in a sane and safe manner...

A Phoronix reader pointed out recent patches by a SUSE engineer working on support for mounting root file-systems over SMB (Samba)...

Linux 5.3 isn't being released until this weekend after being delayed by one week, but already there have been a few early pull requests submitted for the to-be-opened Linux 5.4 merge window...

While not quite as exciting as the big performance boost found with SVT-VP9 for AVX2 CPUs a few days ago, Intel's Scalable Video Technology team has released SVT-HEVC 1.4.1 as their newest feature release to this open-source H.265/HEVC video encoder...