Open-source News

Experimental Patches Updated Working On FSCRYPT Encryption For Btrfs

Phoronix - Sun, 07/24/2022 - 17:23
While the Btrfs file-system has many advanced features like transparent file-system compression and built-in RAID, at the moment it lacks native file-system encryption. Fortunately, there are patches that continue to be worked on that aim to provide such functionality...

Linux x86 32-bit Is Vulnerable To Retbleed But Don't Expect It To Get Fixed

Phoronix - Sun, 07/24/2022 - 07:39
While relevant Intel and AMD processors have been mitigated for the recent Retbleed security vulnerability affecting older generations of processors, those mitigations currently just work for x86_64 kernels and will not work if running an x86 (32-bit) kernel on affected hardware. But it's unlikely to get fixed unless some passionate individual steps up as the upstream developers and vendors have long since moved on to just caring about x86_64...

HarfBuzz 5.0 Released With Progress On Supporting The "Boring Expansion" Font Spec

Phoronix - Sun, 07/24/2022 - 04:38
HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support...

AMD Sensor Fusion Hub "SFH1.1" Support Coming In Linux 5.20 For Newer Laptops

Phoronix - Sun, 07/24/2022 - 01:23
With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

Intel GuC Firmware Fix Submitted For Linux 5.19

Phoronix - Sat, 07/23/2022 - 22:29
Sent in on Friday night were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver fixes for Linux 5.19-rc8 due out on Sunday. While usually the late-stage changes tend to be not too eventful, this pull does carry some extra interest since it does fix the Intel GuC firmware breakage I wrote about last week that ended up breaking Alder Lake P graphics on Linux 5.19 unless also upgrading the firmware version...

Adreno 619 Support Added To Mesa - Enables Fairphone 4 GPU Support

Phoronix - Sat, 07/23/2022 - 20:49
Linux 5.20 is adding Qualcomm Adreno 619 GPU support to the MSM DRM/KMS driver and now the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is also enabling that A619 GPU support which in turn enables open-source OpenGL acceleration on devices like the Fairphone 4...

GNU C Library Finally Adds arc4random Functions For Linux

Phoronix - Sat, 07/23/2022 - 17:28
The arc4random, arc4random_buf, and arc4random_uniform functions have been common on the BSDs for years to provide higher quality random number generation than rand/random and alternative functions. But now as of yesterday the GNU C Library (Glibc) has finally added the arc4random functions for use on Linux!..

KDE Plasma 5.26 Will Start Faster, Many Other KDE Improvements Abound

Phoronix - Sat, 07/23/2022 - 17:09
Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates...

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