Open-source News

Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release...

A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor...

AMD's TEE Driver For Loading "Trusted Applications" On Their Secure Processor Under Linux  Phoronix

The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support...

LibreELEC 9.2 Embedded Linux OS Brings Raspberry Pi 4 Improvements, Kodi 18.5  Softpedia News

European Linux Open-Sourcing Summit, Lyon, France, reviewed  Irish Tech News

Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.

PinePhone Linux phone can somewhat run regular Linux desktop apps  SlashGear

PinePhone Linux phone can somewhat run regular Linux desktop apps  SlashGear

Ingo Molnar sent in the kernel's scheduler changes along with the other material he is overseeing for Linux 5.5. With this next version of the Linux kernel comes a rework to the Completely Fair Scheduler's load balancing logic. This is helping some workloads at least but with the intrusive change runs the risk of possible regressions...

Linux 5.5's Scheduler Sees A Load Balancing Rework For Better Perf But Risks Regressions  Phoronix

GNU Linux-Libre 5.4 Kernel Released for Those Seeking 100% Freedom for Their PCs  LXer

While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better...

Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64...

Linux 5.5 To Finally Wire Up EFI RNG Code For x86 As Another Source Of Entropy  Phoronix

Bash too basic? Too much whitespace in Python? Go too corporate?

You should try Lua, a lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language supporting procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. And best of all, it uses explicit syntax for scoping!

Lua is also small. Lua's source code is just 24,000 lines of C, the Lua interpreter (on 64-bit Linux) built with all standard Lua libraries is 247K, and the Lua library is 421K.

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Mobile phones are becoming more powerful every day, so it is no surprise that they can beat most computers from the not-so-distant past. This also means the tools available on them are getting more powerful every day.

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My first memory of playing with a computer was through an MS-DOS terminal on the x86 PC in my grandfather's pharmaceutical research lab in the early '90s—playing games stored on 3.5" floppy disks and doing touch-typing exercises. As technology improved, I spent an obscene amount of time taking my computer apart to add more RAM, a new graphics card, or a new fan, mostly so I could play cooler games. It was a fun, ongoing project, and I bonded with my father over it. It was also way cheaper than buying a new computer.

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Netstat – derived from the words network and statistics – is a command-line utility used by system administrators for analyzing network statistics. It displays a whole manner of statistics such as open ports and...

Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs...