Open-source News

With the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" open-source driver support as what appear to be the first "Navi 2" GPUs and the first of the "GFX10.3" generation on the graphics engine side there is the initial kernel support with Linux 5.9 and the initial Mesa support for 20.2. That Mesa support has been focused on RadeonSI as the official OpenGL driver as well as Mesa's RADV driver as the Radeon Vulkan driver in-tree but not officially supported by AMD. That RADV support is currently un-tested. Both drivers currently depend upon the "AMDGPU" back-end found in the forthcoming LLVM 11.0 with its initial GFX10.3 support. But now on the RADV driver side there is preliminary GFX10.3 bits landing for the popular "ACO" back-end...

RADV ACO Back-End Begins Tackling Navi 2 / GFX10.3 Support  Phoronix

Among the many pull requests sent in for the Linux 5.9 merge window by longtime developer Ingo Molnar are the usual assortment of scheduler improvements...

Linux 5.8 released, features Thunderbolt 4.0 support and improved security  TechRadar

The fixes to the Linux BootHole fixes are in  ZDNet

Wayfire, a Wayland compositor inspired by the likes of Compiz with different desktop effects, is out today with a new feature release...

Linux 5.9 is bringing another feature that's long been baking and of interest to a growing number of stakeholders... checkpoint/restore functionality of unprivileged processes...

Checkpoint/Restore Of Unprivileged Processes Sent In For Linux 5.9  Phoronix

Computer Programming and Cyber Security for Beginners: This Book Includes: Python Machine Learning, SQL, Linux, Hacking with Kali Linux, Ethical Hacking. Coding and Cybersecurity Fundamentals  Digital Market News

Open Source Security Foundation Joined by Microsoft and Others To Improve Linux Software  Redmondmag.com

Linux Foundation to improve open-source security with new initiative  SDTimes.com

Switching from the "Radeon" to "AMDGPU" kernel driver on Linux is possible for Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards and doing so can mean slight performance benefits, the ability to run the AMDVLK or RADV Vulkan drivers, and simply making use of this better maintained driver. But having these original GCN graphics cards default to the modern AMDGPU driver appears held up by the lack of analog video output support with that driver...

Defaulting Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs To Better Linux Driver Is Held Up By Analog Outputs  Phoronix

Red Hat changes certification rules in response to the coronavirus pandemic  ZDNet

Packaging and deploying .NET Core for Linux - Part 2  Microsoft - Channel 9

Red Hat, IBM, Google, Microsoft join group focusing on open source security  WRAL Tech Wire

Shiny New Linux Kernel 5.8 Comes With Highest Number Of Commits  Fossbytes

The Linux kernel work for making use of the x86_64 FSGSBASE instruction since Intel Ivy Bridge and since then AMD CPUs also is set to finally land with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel. The FSGSBASE support has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side...

After 5 Years, FSGSBASE Support Finally Ready For Linux To Enhance AMD/Intel Performance  Phoronix

The close_range() system call is intended to allow efficiently closing a range of file descriptors (or all file descriptors) of the calling task. This system call was devised in cooperation with FreeBSD developers...