Open-source News

New Linux 5.14 Tracer To Help With Measuring Operating System Noise

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 19:33
The tracing subsystem within the Linux kernel is seeing some exciting improvements with Linux 5.14 to help with low-latency analysis and also measuring operating system noise...

Linux 5.14's Perf Tooling Makes Preparations For Intel Alder Lake

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 18:25
The Linux kernel's tooling around the perf subsystem is the latest area seeing a lot of work for Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors with a mix of high performance and low power processor cores...

Linux 5.14 Works Around Compatibility With Some Digital Camera exFAT File-Systems

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 18:16
Merged back in Linux 5.4 in late 2019 was the exFAT file-system driver that has proven to be quite mature at this stage with the work led by Samsung under the blessing of Microsoft. There hasn't been much in the way of exFAT file-system driver changes in recent kernel releases given its maturity. Even with Linux 5.14 there are just two exFAT patches but end up being notable at least for some users due to fixing file-system compatibility with some digital cameras...

Enter invisible passwords using this Python module

opensource.com - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 15:01

Passwords are particularly problematic for programmers. You're not supposed to store them without encrypting them, and you're not supposed to reveal what's been typed when your user enters one. This became particularly important to me when I decided I wanted to boost security on my laptop. I encrypt my home directory—but once I log in, any password stored as plain text in a configuration file is potentially exposed to prying eyes.


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How I avoid breaking functionality when modifying legacy code

opensource.com - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 15:00

Allow me a bit of introspection. I've been working in the software engineering field for 31 years. During those 31 years, I've modified a lot of legacy software.


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Latest Patches Sent Out For Adding Rust Support To The Linux Kernel

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 05:33
This US Independence Day a revised set of patches were mailed out providing support for Rust as a secondary programming language within the Linux kernel for areas where increased security and memory safety are of utmost importance. The set of 17 patches plumb the Linux kernel with initial support, an example driver, and in total amount to more than 33k lines of new code in its early form...

Linux 5.14 Picks Up Support For New Sound Hardware, Including Alder Lake M

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 04:16
Linux 5.14 is ready to begin supporting some new sound hardware while some recently proposed USB audio latency improvements were rejected for now...

AMD's Linux Strides In H1'21 From FreeSync HDMI To PyTorch ROCm

Phoronix - Mon, 07/05/2021 - 00:36
As part of our various Q2'21 and H1'21 Linux/open-source recaps, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news so far this calendar year...

Linux Gets New Thermal Driver Code Ahead of Alder Lake

Phoronix - Sun, 07/04/2021 - 21:14
The thermal subsystem updates for the Linux 5.14 kernel include more work on Intel's int340x driver that is used by newer Intel laptops for dealing with their varying thermal control capabilities and exposing more thermal information to user-space for use by Intel's Thermal Daemon (Thermald). This cycle the work includes a new driver that will be used by next-gen Alder Lake SoCs...

GNU Binutils 2.37 Is On The Way - Finally Drops ARM Symbian OS Support

Phoronix - Sun, 07/04/2021 - 19:16
GNU Binutils 2.37 has been branched and the release process initiated for these low-level GNU components likely seeing their v2.37 release later this month...

Linux Will Keep Core Scheduling Disabled By Default

Phoronix - Sun, 07/04/2021 - 18:29
Among the many new features that were sent in so far this week for the Linux 5.14 merge window was the long in-development work on "core scheduling" to reduce the Hyper Threading information leakage risks from side channels and help ensuring deterministic performance on such HT/SMT systems by controlling the resources that can run on a sibling thread. As a follow-up to that article from a few days ago, core scheduling will now be disabled by default...

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