Open-source News

Hanukkah famously has eight nights of celebration. The Hanukkah menorah, however, has nine candles: eight regular candles and a ninth that is always offset. It is called the shamash or shamos, which loosely translates to meaning "servant" or "janitor."

The shamos is the candle that lights all the others: it is the only candle whose fire can be used, not just watched. As we wrap up our series on the Zen of Python, I see how namespaces provide a similar service.

read more

I am an avid reader, but I go through periods where I'm so busy that it's hard to find the time to keep up with my reading list. Even during my busiest times, I try to stay up to date on DevOps news since it's one of my areas of focus.

read more

Just a friendly reminder that if you wish to show your support in 2019 and take part in our Christmas / New Year's deal, time is quickly running out...

Introduced with Linux 5.4 was a long-awaited Microsoft exFAT file-system driver albeit within the kernel's staging area and based upon some dated Samsung file-system driver code. That exFAT staging driver was improved upon more with Linux 5.5 but ultimately there is a concurrent effort for replacing it with a driver derived from newer Samsung open-source code and to be merged outside of staging...

Linux's exFAT Driver Looking To Still Be Replaced By A Newer Driver From Samsung  Phoronix

How to install GIMP on Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia  BetaNews

Going back to the start of December with the Linux 5.5 merge window we have encountered several significant performance regressions. Over the weeks since we've reproduced the behavior on both Intel and AMD systems along with large and small CPUs. Following some holiday weekend bisecting fun, here is the cause at least partially for the Linux 5.5 slowdowns.

One Of The Reasons Why Linux 5.5 Can Be Running Slower  Phoronix

Linus Torvalds just released the fourth weekly release candidate of Linux 5.5 following a fairly light week due to the Christmas holidays...

Linux 5.5-rc4 Released Following A Light Christmas Week  Phoronix

With the recently launched Threadripper 3960X / 3970X processors there was a workaround needed to boot them on Linux until an AMD MCE driver issue was resolved. That patch was upstreamed last week into the Linux 5.5 development kernel while now is getting ready to make its debut into supported Linux stable release branches...

Linux 5.4.7 / 4.19.92 / 4.14.161 Bringing The AMD MCE Fix For New Threadripper CPUs  Phoronix

BlackArch Linux Ethical Hacking OS Gets First 2020 Release with 120 New Tools  Softpedia News

Last week were some benchmarks showing LLVM Clang hitting ~96% the performance of GCC using Intel Ice Lake while now for the recently released Zen2-based AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X we are seeing results where overall LLVM Clang is now at performance parity to GCC.

LLVM Clang Performance Matching The GCC Compiler On AMD Threadripper 3960X  Phoronix

While open-source software development activity was light this week due to the Christmas holiday, some new features still landed this week for KDE...

The 2010s saw the release of Wayland 1.0, Ubuntu's Mir initially being a "competitor" to now embracing Wayland, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE now having good support for it as an alternative to X11, and other functionality continues to be added to Wayland compositors and its standard protocols...

Wayland's Wild Decade From v1.0 Release To Usable GNOME/KDE Desktop Support  Phoronix

Last week I posted benchmarks looking at seven years of Ubuntu Linux performance in re-testing the releases of Ubuntu 13.04 through Ubuntu 19.10 stable and even the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS daily development image. A question that came up was how much better that performance would have been without any CPU vulnerability mitigations in place for Ubuntu 20.04... Well, here's that answer...

Ubuntu 13.04 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 Development Performance Comparison Without Mitigations  Phoronix