Open-source News

Fedora is one of the Linux distributions that ships with a plethora of debug options during its "Rawhide" development phase to ease in diagnosing issues that turn up during testing rather than building everything in a release mode during the development cycle. While these debug options are good for debugging, the performance impact continues adding up and reaching a point that the Fedora Rawhide debug kernel is too slow for some tasks...

While normally big CPU security mitigation work done behind closed-doors is in good shape for the vulnerability embargo date, Retbleed has been an exception. Nearly two weeks since Retbleed was made public, the Linux kernel patches around it continue with more now sent in today ahead of Linux 5.19-rc8 to address fallout from the mitigation handling...

While much of Intel's Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist enablement appears to be in decent shape for Linux 5.20 with the small BAR support expected to land, the compute support being exposed to user-space in 5.19, etc, one of the few remaining pieces is the GSC support. The Intel GSC is their new Graphics System Controller found with their discrete GPU and used for security-related operations...

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...

The Fedora Linux Rawhide Kernel Is Becoming Too Slow With Its Many Debug Options  Phoronix

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...

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

The Windows 11 taskbar is getting better for people who open tons of apps – OSnews  OS News

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...

You may now buy Windows 11 licenses directly from Microsoft (but shouldn't)  Ghacks

7 Myths About Linux That You Should Stop Believing  MUO - MakeUseOf

With the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle is support for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub v1.1 revision being found in newer Ryzen laptops...

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

How to install Buildah OCI on Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 LTS  Linux Shout

Intel Linux Driver Patch Brings a Whopping 100x Performance Uplift in Ray-Traced Vulkan Titles  Hardware Times

An Overview of the Linux Operating System for Beginners  hackernoon.com

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...

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...

The Intel Xeon W9-3495 processor of the Sapphire Rapids family wasspotted on Linux - Game News 24  Game News 24

AMD Rembrandt: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance Review  Phoronix